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The world's best hipster black metal band unsurprisingly crafts a great crossover-friendly black metal album. | The world's best hipster black metal band unsurprisingly crafts a great crossover-friendly black metal album. | Liturgy: Aesthethica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15427-aesthethica/ | Aesthethica | Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the creative force behind the Brooklyn-based black-metal band Liturgy, has gone to extravagant lengths to ensure that the hardcore metal community utterly loathes him. The band performs black-metal festivals in jeans and street clothes, instead of the normal corpse paint, to heckling and jeers. In interviews, he talks about metal's ability to induce "disorientation from ordinary, end-directed existence" like some black-metal David Foster Wallace. He uses the music, which has virulent opposition to Christianity encoded in its DNA, as a vehicle to explore Big Ideas about, among other things, Christian redemption. Aesthethica, their second album, comes out on Thrill Jockey, home to the Sea and Cake, High Places, Fiery Furnaces, and absolutely zero other metal bands. Oh, and if you ask, he's also happy to share stories about hanging out with Ezra Koenig when they both went to Columbia University.
He and Koenig would probably still get along-- they both seem to take a perverse joy insouciantly baiting the easily riled. The hatred Liturgy have incurred is white-hot and laser-focused, as the Google search for "Liturgy black metal hipster assholes" eloquently attests. As it is with any genre, black metal "authenticity" is basically a smell test: It's black metal if it feels like black metal. It's an unassailable, indefinable, and profoundly inarguable criterion, but there it is. And it must be said that, in the end, Liturgy just don't feel like black metal. Somehow, you can hear the jeans.
Luckily, this doesn't matter in the slightest. In fact, it's Aesthethica's primary sense of strength. Without "reinventing" black metal, Liturgy have successfully refashioned its basic components-- the thundering, all-sixteenths assault of blast beats, shredding tremolo guitars, and boiled-pitch vocals-- in their own willful image and directed its energy toward the [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ir own idiosyncratic ends. Hunt-Hendrix might be the kind of guy who says things like, "The meaning of black metal has something to do with a longing for ecstatic annihilation, a perfect void," in interviews, but he's also the kind of musician who pursues these thoughts just as enthusiastically in his music. Aesthethica is inventive, alive, and shrieking with more ideas than many bands explore over an entire career.
The idea of "a perfect void" can be heard in Liturgy's complicated relationship with momentum. Many songs here settle into a mesmerizing stasis as often as they barrel forward. Songs that seem to be gearing up for a stratospheric takeoff instead harden into a rhythmic lockstep. "Generation", for instance, grinds out a series of syncopations on a single thudding power chord for a mind-obliterating seven minutes. It resembles Steve Reich's 2 x 5, in which two rock ensembles face off onstage and play highly mannered figures at each other, more than the work of any metal band.
The echo of Reich isn't incidental; even more than their debut Renihilation, Aesthethica feels like black metal by way of the conservatory. Hunt-Hendrix, it turns out, studied composition at Columbia with spectralist composer Tristan Murail, and guitarist Bernard Gann is the son of the post-minimalist composer and former Village Voice critic Kyle Gann. You can hear the sound of A-students getting loose in some of Aesthethica's wilder moments: the glimmering fugue of guitars buzzing like mechanized locusts on "Sun of Light", for example, or the perpetual-motion keyboard canon that opens "Helix Skull". Hunt-Hendrix's words, which are utterly indistinguishable sans lyrics sheet, point determinedly toward the same transcendence the music seems to be aiming for: "Floating upwards/ Lungs filling up with air/ As God inhales me/ Into the impossible," Hunt-Hendrix screams on "True Will".
None of this will endear Liturgy to black-metal fanatics, of course. But every insular scene needs its carpetbaggers and interlopers, and Liturgy can hardly be accused of disrespect; you just don't make something this joyful out of music you hate. Without interested outsiders peeking their nosy way in, we would have never seen David Bowie, or Elvis Costello, or the Beastie Boys, or Bad Brains. Liturgy, for their part, seem more than willing to take their lumps for what they believe in. As Hunt-Hendrix recently told Time Out New York, "We are really willing to suffer being hated for doing what feels right aesthetically." If that isn't fucking kvlt, nothing is. | 2011-05-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-05-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | May 13, 2011 | 8.3 | 53eec88c-d66c-4fa5-83bb-41375663369e | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
About the time A Series of Sneaks hit the scene, I probably could have been convinced to wager a\n ... | About the time A Series of Sneaks hit the scene, I probably could have been convinced to wager a\n ... | Spoon: Kill the Moonlight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7428-kill-the-moonlight/ | Kill the Moonlight | About the time A Series of Sneaks hit the scene, I probably could have been convinced to wager a substantial amount of money on Spoon coming out on top. On top of what? Of anything. That album was the sound of a band that had nailed their particular aesthetic to the wall, or so I thought. Spoon was ready; Spoon was there; and then, fatefully, Spoon was dropped. Monsieur Laffitte, the Elektra A&R; man whose villainy was immortalized on the band's The Agony of Laffitte EP, set them adrift. Now, few things fuck with a band like being dropped by their label (taking third place behind smack, and of course, suicide), and indeed, something changed in Spoon. Freshly cut loose, they suddenly decided to go 'respectable,' cleaning up their sound as if to win back Laffitte's heart while deriding him in song.
I'll be candid: at that point, I missed Spoon. Girls was swell, but its slickly produced lounge grooves only made me long for the casual "just swung by the studio to drop off some tunes" brilliance of Sneaks. Nothing on it could ever generate the massive, ultra-condensed endorphin rush of "Car Radio." Fortunately, somewhere between there and here, Spoon took the time to burn their sound down to its foundation, dissect the sullen intricacies of Girls using Sneaks' barbed, melodic hooks, and reassemble something out of the pieces that's far more than the sum of its parts. The result, Kill the Moonlight, plays like a greatest hits compilation not of songs, but of sounds-- the best echoes of everything Spoon has done swirl around and unite. Bowie soul seamlessly flirts with Spoon's deceptively simplistic rhythms and vocals that span all the hope and hopelessness of the human condition.
Moonlight plays out as if Spoon is standing dead center in a vast, empty warehouse. Thousands of seats are placed close to the band, and there's a drawn-out nervousness-- total silence-- before they produce a single sound. At that moment, a Hammond-esque drive kicks off "Small Stakes" with enough energy to get even a factoryful of hipsters doing the wave. And then you look around and realize that you're the only person in attendance. This record is an adventure in starkness, beyond Girls Can Tell even while evoking some of that album's finest moments.
But any hack band can create space, right? Maybe. But using it is the tricky part. Like some of the best minimalists in music, Spoon use the null and void to create tension which bolsters and sets apart every nuance of the music-- every handclap, every reverberating crash, every beep from the synthesizer. "Paper Tiger," in particular, effortlessly floats into of the realm of the hyper-real; there's nearly more silence than music. Spoon has always struck me as a band that, no matter how good the rest of their album was, could always be relied upon to produce at least one or two songs every album that would make my jaw drop ("Car Radio," "Everything Hits at Once," "Lines in the Suit"). And while Moonlight has far more than its fair share of stunners, "Paper Tiger" blows them all away. Daniel distantly croon-growls, "I'll never hold you back/ And I won't force my will/ 'I will no longer do the Devil's wishes'/ Somethin' I read on a dollar bill," over reverse-playback beats, solitary piano chords, and drumsticks; nothing else. It's an effect of singular elegance and power.
The rest of the album is largely more upbeat, fortunately, or it could have slipped into a fugue. A little of the guitar braggadocio that netted the band so many past comparisons to the Pixies, and older acts like Wire, is showcased on "Jonathon Fisk." The riffs hit hard and fast, and some of the horns Bowie once used on Hunky Dory drop by to lighten things up. Later, the rock piano stylings of Jerry Lee Lewis could shed a tear for catapulting the bittersweet "Someone Something" into the "best of" section of Spoon's catalog. Bright-eyed optimism and the faintest hint of the uncertainty of expectation are conveyed through the staccato piano, and the vocals build and carry it off to a beautiful conclusion. Also of note: "Something to Look Forward To" may be the best fusion of older and newer Spoon to date, and "Stay Don't Go" will likely be your only chance to experience a sample of Britt beat-boxing. Truly surreal.
Kill the Moonlight is a hailstorm of complex emotional underpinnings; sometimes vibrant, sometimes morose, but usually in a frighteningly anxious limbo. "Vittorio E" closes shop and turns eyes toward the future with a 3\xBD-minute synopsis of the album's emotional heft. Choir-like harmonies fade in from the depths behind the main vocal, and a simple, sweet piano refrain lifts it away from any of the sadness or trouble left behind it. It never looks back.
Indeed, Spoon's latest is their magnum opus to date; it takes a scalpel to the highlight reel of their career, cutting and pasting a 35-minute tour de force that ends too soon. And yet, despite all the elements Spoon has toyed with over the years, it doesn't sound distinctly like any of them. In fact, this all feels like a decidedly different Spoon, like the real start of the next phase for which the merely likable Girls Can Tell was only a bridge. So be prepared. The difference is in the distance. | 2002-08-14T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2002-08-14T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 14, 2002 | 8.9 | 53eef9dd-8779-4c0c-8fab-4c24df034840 | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
The Chicago industrial rap duo tears into the horrors of contemporary America over dark, glitchy beats that convey an omnipresent sense of menace. | The Chicago industrial rap duo tears into the horrors of contemporary America over dark, glitchy beats that convey an omnipresent sense of menace. | Angry Blackmen: The Legend of ABM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/angry-blackmen-the-legend-of-abm/ | The Legend of ABM | Halfway through The Legend of ABM, the new album from Chicago industrial rap duo Angry Blackmen, Quentin Branch stares down Azrael, the Angel of Death. He opens “Dead Men Tell No Lies” by growling, “Death is all around me, smell the scent in my nostrils/Grim Reaper glaring in my eyes looking hostile,” his gravelly voice cutting against a sandpapery bassline. On every song, Branch and bandmate Brian Warren confront what feels like their imminent destruction. The ambient stress of being alive in America, especially for Black men, stems from recognizing that potential harm is omnipresent: Cops have bloodshot eyes and itchy trigger fingers, drugs and alcohol course through veins and cloud vision, the weight of a rigged economy keeps us all under the thumb of the invisible hand. Angry Blackmen’s music is the sound of the unfolding apocalypse rendered in stunning 4K.
Issued by stalwart Philadelphia experimental label Deathbomb Arc, The Legend of ABM shares its chaotic DNA with labelmates like clipping. and JPEGMAFIA. Derek Allen, who records dark, glitchy electronic music under the alias Formants, produced the record in its entirety, giving the songs a distorted, metallic palette. Snares sound like blades being sharpened, field recordings become smoldering drones, and kick drums hit like meteors cratering the earth. It’s brutal and harsh but always controlled. Warren and Branch first linked with Allen in 2020 after meeting at a basement show in Elmwood Park, Illinois. Allen worked with ABM on their 2020 album HEADSHOTS! and 2021 EP REALITY!, but The Legend of ABM is a full realization of their collaborative potential. Allen’s production is stripped of melody in favor of a constant oppressive atmosphere, inspiring Branch and Warren to lean further into the horrors of life under late capitalism.
There’s a blunt edge to their writing, as if the lyrics were scratched into stone with a Bowie knife. They’re both unflinchingly frank, detailing their demons with disarming honesty. Self-harm and destructive behavior are constant motifs. On Branch’s solo cut, “Suicidal Tendencies,” he describes the contours of a slow-moving mental breakdown, a collapse fueled by severe alcoholism, bleak living conditions, and an unshakeable feeling that he wouldn’t make it past 27. He’s on the other side of it, having gotten sober and moved to New Mexico, but a car crash in Santa Fe that nearly killed him and his girlfriend still repeats in his mind. Warren’s solo turn on “Amor Propio” (Spanish for “self-esteem”) is equally harrowing, a journey through the day-to-day frustrations snowballing since he was a child. It culminates with a withering admission: “Kinda hard to love myself/All these years in my skin.”
ABM work best when Branch and Warren play off each other; they weave with easy and undeniable chemistry, delighting in the challenge of one-upping the last verse. Tracks like “Stanley Kubrick” radiate competitive intensity; both rappers tumble through breathless triplet cadences, unbothered by quick tempos or blistering noise. On “Sabotage,” Warren speeds across the squelching synths and jagged claps, rapping about generational trauma with a Pharoahe Monch-like elasticity. Branch follows with a more spacious flow, finding the amorphous pockets that made Young Dolph so captivating.
Though The Legend of ABM is in conversation with noise rap, it feels more immediately accessible than a lot of the prickly subgenre’s output can be. Dälek records are often stately, almost academic, and clipping.’s work sometimes dips into brooding theater-kid territory. Angry Blackmen and Formants’ visceral but upfront approach owes more to the boom of 2010s Chicago drill and the wild-eyed frenzy of late aughts Lil Wayne than the punishing racket of Yellow Swans or Masonna. ABM’s brand of blown-out beats seems less like an aesthetic choice and more like a natural depiction of how it feels to survive in 2024. The cacophony never ceases and the mind always races, but there must be some way to exist within the din. | 2024-01-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Deathbomb Arc | January 30, 2024 | 7.4 | 53f2b6e6-ae92-4373-9b92-16bf8c3cc2b7 | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
Linda Perhacs' psychedelic folk album, 1970’s Parallelograms, has persisted over decades, even as she's moved on with her life and copies of it disappeared from print. The followup, arriving 44 years later, was made with several of Perhacs' admirers, including Julia Holter and Nite Jewel's Ramona Gonzalez. | Linda Perhacs' psychedelic folk album, 1970’s Parallelograms, has persisted over decades, even as she's moved on with her life and copies of it disappeared from print. The followup, arriving 44 years later, was made with several of Perhacs' admirers, including Julia Holter and Nite Jewel's Ramona Gonzalez. | Linda Perhacs: The Soul of All Natural Things | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19066-linda-perhacs-the-soul-of-all-natural-things/ | The Soul of All Natural Things | Linda Perhacs is easily the most celebrated dental hygienist to ever have recorded a classic psychedelic folk album. That album, 1970’s Parallelograms, has persisted over decades, even as Perhacs herself moved on with her life after the record failed and copies of it slowly disappeared from print. The people who heard it, though, did not move on. They made their own editions and passed the album to those they deemed worthy. One of those people was the leader of the prog-metal band Opeth, who did as much as anyone to keep copies of Parallelograms circulating. A legend built. Eventually, someone notified Perhacs.
It’s the kind of tidy capsule story that makes for an excellent set of liner notes, but it’s worth stepping back and reassessing the phenomenal unlikeliness of the tale now that we’re faced with its follow-up, The Soul of All Natural Things. The gulf separating 1970 from now might be dizzying for some, but Perhacs' sense of time is looser than ours, and it doesn’t seem to phase her.
The Soul Of All Natural Things was made with several of Perhacs' contemporary admirers helping her; Julia Holter appears on "Prisms of Glass", and Ramona Gonzalez contributes backing vocals. The resulting album has a fluid, communal energy to it that feels very different from Parallelograms. Perhacs' voice is duskier at 70 than it was at 27, but her range is still surprising, dipping into sultry contralto and leaping easily into higher registers. Her ear for multi-tracked harmonies remains the clearest link back to her first album, and you can hear her quizzical and highly original musical mind operating through them. It's easy to find in them the sound that bewitched latter-day followers like Holter.
What The Soul Of All Natural Things isn't, though, is personal, or small-scale, the way Parallelograms was. Perhacs’ first words on Parallelograms were “And it rains here every day since I came”—a conversational line, right down to the way it begins with “And.” That song followed a series of abstracted thoughts like raindrops across a window pane—"It kinda gets inside you...the silences, I mean. They kinda wrap around you and loosen everything." The first words on the opening title track of The Soul of All Natural Things, meanwhile, are “See the waves that break upon the rocks and stones/ Hear the winds that play upon the ice and foam.” Same focus—the weather, the elements—but the smallness of the human mind has been subtracted. There is no chit-chat to be had here.
In other words, The Soul Of All Natural Things is more purely new age than Perhacs' first record. God as a force, as a character, suffuses these songs, whispering to wind and waves on the title track and carrying the world's "river of souls" on "River of God". "Immunity" is a plea to God to help listen for his love. There is no dogma, just a gentle insistence on slowing down. “Where are you going and if you are going can you take some time for me, just today?" she inquires on "Children". The music is gorgeously recorded, with strings and nylon-string guitar filitering through the mix like the sunlight through the trees in her Topanga Canyon home. But where Parallelograms basked in some cosmic energies, it also offered you a series of conflicting thoughts to puzzle over. The Soul of All Natural Things mostly pats you on the head a little and tell you to calm down.
The best moments are when the song forms fracture a little, and Perhacs' multi-tracked voice is allowed to spiral free. “Prisms of Glass” and “Freely”, two songs in the middle of the record, capture more genuine spiritual feeling with the haunting sound of Perhacs’ interlocking vocals than anything else on the album. On “Song of the Planets”, her voice blurs into a repetition of the words “one” and “sun,” creating the blissful synthesis that the lyrics can only point to. The Soul of All Natural Things is sumptuously recorded and often beautiful, and honestly, it’s wonderful to have it. If it's difficult to envision a 44-year cult of devotion arising from its songs, well, once in this lifetime is probably enough for that kind of achievement. | 2014-03-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2014-03-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Asthmatic Kitty | March 7, 2014 | 6.8 | 53f605b9-0fb5-4be0-9f7c-3c078c7158a3 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Cilvia Demo, the debut release from Top Dawg Entertainment's Isaiah Rashad, introduces an MC who isn't afraid to lay every anxiety and frustration bare and winds up looking stronger for it. His first full-length could go down as one of the best debuts of the year. | Cilvia Demo, the debut release from Top Dawg Entertainment's Isaiah Rashad, introduces an MC who isn't afraid to lay every anxiety and frustration bare and winds up looking stronger for it. His first full-length could go down as one of the best debuts of the year. | Isaiah Rashad: Cilvia Demo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19014-isaiah-rashad-cilvia/ | Cilvia Demo | The previously Los Angeles-centered TDE crew's adoption of a Southern member isn't so strange. Since they already feel like a modern iteration of the Dungeon Family approach that has seeped into the second-generation Cali gangsta, finding an inverse in Isaiah Rashad makes perfect sense. He's an OutKast fan from the South who's also comfortable in the context of a West Coast that gave us Labcabincalifornia and Me Against the World the same year. While his BET Hip Hop Awards Cypher appearance last year was a bit of an advance notice, the abrupt arrival of his voice in full proves at least one thing: Top Dawg has scouts that'd make Billy Beane lose his damn mind.
Rashad's background draws from a few different sources. While he rode around Chattanooga bumping No Limit classics through the speakers of the '95 Civic he nicknamed “Cilvia”, he did so knowing that the real scene and all the networking opportunities to advance were some 120 miles down I-75 to Atlanta. His style wound up developing with the outside influence of already known artists, but laced with the personal, true-to-self approach that typically comes from having to impress peers and friends instead of a scene wracked with hypebeasts. And with the development that comes when your subject matter demands introspection from the get-go, Cilvia Demo is as much a revelation as labelmate Kendrick Lamar's breakthrough *Section.80—*only this time, there's also a good kid, m.A.A.d city to look up at and aspire to.
That may come in time, maybe sooner than we think; Cilvia Demo already shows an MC who isn't afraid to lay every anxiety and frustration bare and winds up looking stronger for it. There isn't a clear delineation between Rashad's moments of struggle and his times of strength—these are songs where one typically tests the other, where Hennessey and Jagermeister are less the celebratory ingredients of VIP sections than the coping mechanisms for figuring shit out. Few lines seperate the verse-starting come-on “Baby, can you sucky on my dick/ I know it's big enough” and the admission “I done grown up for my child sake” in “Webbie Flow (U Like)," a song where his swagger and his responsibilities get tangled up in his own self-recognition. The vivid despair of “Heavenly Father", where the one point of hope in a litany of suicidal thoughts and dead-end burnout is the question of “If I give my story to the world/ I wonder if they'd book me for a show,” still persists in the mind when a tribute to the similarly introspective Scarface, “Brad Jordan", has him spitting the rhetoric of invincibility. And there's a line on the title track where he worries about having his own kid look at him the same way he looked at his deadbeat dad; it hits even harder once you've taken in the lyrics about his own feelings about his father. It should all be instantly familiar to anyone dealing with “I'm 21, now what” introspection (or memories thereof).
His headspace comes through so strongly you could easily overlook that Rashad can also put together some fucking verses. There's a single line in the title track that could sum up why his lyrics sink in so deep—“'93 Til be cool for Emmett”—that packs the thematic merging of South and West, racist trauma and artistic resilience, oppressive violence and expressive freedom, all in six words. He can rattle off dense internals with double-meaning followups (“Soliloquy”'s line “Leave the bodies on the cul-de-sac, follow me the cult is back” opens the door for a Jim Jones meta-reference), he's got his share of punchlines (a pistol in “Menthol” “knock caps like it's senior year”), his hooks draw blood (“Tranquility for a Brutus/ And hard road for a Caesar”), and he mixes personal details and pop-culture namedrops so naturally that even his Vince Vaughn and Larry David shout-outs seem like matter-of-fact acknowledgements than celebrity punchlines.
As for his voice, Rashad's prone to conjuring up influences in a way that makes part of his stylistic blueprint clear. Along with the aforementioned Scarface shout-out, “West Savannah” makes the OutKast connection implicit; same for “R.I.P. Kevin Miller” and Master P. Throw in how he first started modeling his flow off a young Lil Wayne, and that's the base for a strong Southern itinerary that he's managed to make his own. He's turned those reference points into something more slippery and reflective, and whether his clear, subtly needling, percussive drawl is hyped up or worn down, he rides the beat with a sharp sense of timing. There are some occasional deliberate hitches in his flow that play up the unmediated, conversational yet still beat-driven cadence of his voice to an extent that it's hard to even break it down into component parts. It just is, and it can't and shouldn't be anything else.
At least a little of that could be the production talking, granted: the slate of beats on Cilvia Demo unites into a consistently immersive, complete album package that's just as ruminative as the lyrics. It draws from a downtempo vibe that swaps out Southern hip-hop's deep soul for noir jazz while retaining that certain cruising-speed dream-state glide. Post-Dirty South in the same way that previous TDE high points have been post-g-funk—indebted but transcendent—there's a consistent thread of deep, often heavily reverbed pianos and brittle yet steady off-kilter snares that make up for the South being the only American hip-hop region to never really give that whole Soulquarian thing a shot. That it pulls it off with a 10-producer committee full of relative unknowns is worth noting. Half of them have Cilvia Demo as their only Discogs credit, but their work stands out: Ross Vega's muted, melting-organ and screw-drum-lope opener “Hereditary”; Joseph Stranger's glow-bass 98 Dilla minimalism for the title cut; a grip of ethereal ghost-church beats by the Antydote (“Ronnie Drake”; “West Savannah”; “Banana”) that make him almost as much of a blindside breakout as the headliner.
Cilvia Demo ends with a remix of “Shot U Down", the name-maker that dropped last fall and remains the definitive moment of Rashad's career in a sort of “first result in Google autocomplete” kind of way. First single, last track—it's a fitting place for both, initially placing Rashad in an introductory context back in September and now, on this album, feeling like the culmination of a debut full-length that could go down as the best all year. The remix features some TDE co-signs in the form of Jay Rock and ScHoolboy Q, who contribute strong verses in embattled gangsta/money hustler mode, respectively. They're a welcome connection to Rashad's new place in hip-hop, but they're also added attractions rather than skeptic-comforting legitimizers. Rashad's already the real thing, even if his strengths lie in coming to terms with how to turn that real thing into a righteous thing. Now that he's arrived, watching him hit his next destination's going to be exhilarating. | 2014-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | null | February 13, 2014 | 8.2 | 53fb0c7d-12e7-42a1-bb9f-fd9853aabb63 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Christian Fennesz and Jim O'Rourke tease out their differences across two long instrumental tracks that are alternately luminous and blustery. | Christian Fennesz and Jim O'Rourke tease out their differences across two long instrumental tracks that are alternately luminous and blustery. | Jim O’Rourke / Fennesz: It’s Hard for Me To Say I’m Sorry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22030-its-hard-for-me-to-say-im-sorry/ | It’s Hard for Me To Say I’m Sorry | Christian Fennesz and Jim O’Rourke are both romantics with different approaches. The Viennese guitarist and electronic musician Fennesz is an emotional maximalist, and he approaches his material the way J. M. W. Turner did his storm clouds: plowing straight into the squall, sails full, heart bursting. The American experimental-music polymath O’Rourke, on the other hand, is sly and exacting: Where Fennesz goes chasing vapor, O’Rourke is all about containment, channeling every drop of sentiment into finely wrought crystal goblets. On It’s Hard for Me to Say I’m Sorry, the two musicians tease out their respective differences across two long instrumental tracks that are alternately luminous and blustery. It is an album about small details and big emotions, and when it works, the collaboration represents the best of their tendencies.
The two musicians have a long history together. Alongside the Editions Mego founder Peter Rehberg, aka Pita, they have recorded five albums under the Fenn O’Berg alias since 1999, but this is their first duo project together. Running roughly 18 and 20 minutes, respectively, both tracks are vaguely narrative in shape. The material was recorded in Kobe, Kyoto, and Tokyo in September 2015; that there were three locations involved but only two tracks came out of the recordings tells us that some kind of editing was involved, but otherwise, there’s not a lot of daylight on their process. It sounds as though two guitars were involved, as well as a whole lot of digital processing, and it's tempting to ascribe the fuzzier, more reverberant axe-work to Fennesz. The clean-toned harmonic clusters, meanwhile, are more in keeping with O’Rourke’s delicate touch, as well as his frequent use of pedal steel.
“I Just Want You to Stay” is the stronger of the two tracks. It begins with gorgeous filaments of tone ringed with a halo of hazy dissonance, and for four minutes, it just swirls in place, its movements reminiscent of time-lapse video of tumbling thunderheads. Unlike most electronic music, there’s precious little repetition here: Even as the music approaches a long plateau that resembles a beatless, zero-G My Bloody Valentine, it remains in constant mutation. Mercurial and ephemeral, this is music that emphasizes time above all else; its considerable melancholy derives from the knowledge that beauty is inextricable from impermanence. And there are some truly wrenchingly beautiful moments here as it winds toward a long, gentle false ending—soft clacking tones, wreathed in curlicues of feedback, that suggests the sound of pebbles rolling on the ocean floor—and its final climax, ecstatic and bittersweet.
“Wouldn’t Wanna Be Swept Away” proceeds in almost exactly the same way, from its understated introduction to the way it breaks down into four main movements. But the balance is off: After a crystalline beginning, it gives way to a dissonant, distorted passage of eighth-note chug that mistakes bombast for intrigue, and it pushes you away instead of pulling you in. What follows is one of the loveliest passages on the album, rich with distant bell tones, quietly pinging synthesizer, and bright fifths reminiscent of Jon Hassell. But then the heavy-handed strumming returns, and the music's final five minutes amount to a duel between big, purposeful chords and quicksilver background burble. From the track’s tongue-in-cheek title, it’s clear that the artists are well aware of the risks of throwing themselves too eagerly into the wine-dark churn, but here, O’Rourke isn’t quite capable of reining in Fennesz’ more impetuous inclinations, and by the end of it, you find yourself craving a quiet patch of warm, dry land on which to catch your breath. | 2016-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Editions Mego | June 29, 2016 | 7.1 | 53ffb7a8-f5b4-4eae-ab76-9cad82f9f135 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
A glorious vision of house music’s inclusive, utopian potential unfolds on this DJ and producer’s first full-length album. | A glorious vision of house music’s inclusive, utopian potential unfolds on this DJ and producer’s first full-length album. | Honey Dijon: The Best of Both Worlds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/honey-dijon-the-best-of-both-worlds/ | The Best of Both Worlds | Never underestimate the power of a darkened room. Mainstream culture likes to think of dance music as little more than a hedonistic pastime, imagining nightclubs as mere places of entertainment—just another choice on popular culture’s lengthy, laminated menu of leisure options. But for many, dance clubs are places of freedom, of self-actualization, of becoming. They offer space for the margins to be reimagined as a new center, giving people a chance to encounter their truest selves on a crowded dancefloor.
The Chicago-raised DJ and producer Honey Dijon, who grew up on the city’s South Side and first snuck out to go clubbing when she was 12, is one of contemporary house music’s most compelling proponents of this view. Dijon witnessed house history firsthand in Chicago and developed her craft in New York; along the way, friends and mentors like Derrick Carter and Danny Tenaglia helped her harness her talents. But it was what she has called club life’s “cross-pollination of people and cultures”—a mix of genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, and social classes—that taught her the most, along with a passionate belief in sound’s ability to connect people. The Best of Both Worlds, Dijon’s debut album, takes its inspiration from those experiences.
Suffused in radiant synthesizer and murmured vocals, the sultry opener “Love Muscle” sets the album’s tone. “I wake from a deep sleep,” intones Nomi Ruiz, a singer best known for her work with Hercules and Love Affair, sounding half-dazed, reluctant to return to daylight. The song is a kind of conscious dream—an analogue, perhaps, for dance music’s own fantasy world. Occasionally, these fantasies turn explicit: “Personal Slave” wraps heavy-breathing come-ons from Charles McCloud (a.k.a. Matrixxman) around ominous synth stabs, tri-tone riffs playing up a suggestion of danger. Mostly, though, the world the album constructs is one where all strains of house music co-exist on an equal plane.
Over a dozen songs (including a stellar, 12-minute remix of standout cut “Burn”), the album takes up the mantle of a number of classic styles: Taut, synth-riffing jack tracks; heart-in-mouth hip-house; emotive, piano-led deep house. Her DJ sets are famous for their range—her recent Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1 zig-zagged across Gino Soccio, Fela Kuti, Larry Heard, and Isolée—and The Best of Both Worlds stakes out similarly varied ground. “Burn” dances around a slinky, downbeat rhythm reminiscent of Frankie Knuckles’ slower jams; “Why” dips into a 95-BPM reggae groove that’s got Compass Point written all over it.
She can be tremendously playful: “Houze (Houze Rebuilt Mix),” featuring the funk-influenced producer and vocalist Seven Davis Jr., is a driving floor-filler modeled on the “bitch tracks” of ballroom culture. Davis taunts pretenders in a leering baritone (“Bitch that ain’t house/Get out my house”) while Dijon pounds away on the sampling pads, triggering a no-fucks-given stream of monosyllabic vocal shots over a chunky bass-and-drums groove. “Catch the Beat” is more streamlined, but its pleasures are no less boisterous, thanks to the Brooklyn rapper Cakes da Killa’s hiccupping, rapid-fire flow. The track is an obvious throwback to hip-house, a short-lived, high-energy fusion of rap and house from the late ’80s, but Cakes’ nimble delivery is less reminiscent of Fast Eddie or Tyree Cooper than it is Me’Shell NdegéOcello’s “If That’s Your Boyfriend (Li’l Freaky Remix),” a deliciously syncopated Lil Louis version from 1993. “Thunda” is another fun one, kitting out a high-stepping house groove with Latin cowbell rhythms and the kind of brass-synth stabs last heard on Depeche Mode’s Construction Time Again in 1983.
Occasionally, Honey Dijon is happy to dig into a heads-down groove and simply get lost in the sound. “Lift” is a nicely enveloping dub-techno track in the tradition of her adopted home of Berlin. But the album’s most powerful moments are the ones that connect to house music’s emancipatory history. “Look Ahead,” a cover of a 1976 soul-disco cut by the group Aquarian Dream, also invokes Cajmere and Dajae’s spiritual-house anthem “Brighter Days” in its pianos-and-drums groove and its positive outlook (“Hold your head up/Don’t be discouraged/Better times are coming your way”). And it’s not just the lyrics; hope seems to radiate from the waveforms of the music itself, between the gorgeous multi-tracking of Sam Sparro’s voice and the deep, reassuring keys, where every chord in the sequence is somehow more satisfying than the last.
“State of Confusion” is cut from similar cloth, and, largely thanks to singer Joi Cardwell’s agile, deeply emotive voice, it’s an even more alchemical example of the relationship between music and personal liberation. “Burn,” likewise, goes to the heart of that connection: “Only when you see what can be done/Will you realize what you become/Only when you see what you can be/Will you realize that you are free,” sings Jason Walker, the song's guest vocalist, over a sensual, '90s-inspired groove. It’s a simple message, but as Honey Dijon shows throughout this fine debut, it’s one that goes to the deepest meaning of house music. | 2017-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Classic Music Company | October 26, 2017 | 7.5 | 5401167c-43c3-4334-bf19-4115f0abd599 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On this two-track EP, Ricardo Villalobos teams with fellow Chilean producer Umho to celebrate their shared love of Latin American music. | On this two-track EP, Ricardo Villalobos teams with fellow Chilean producer Umho to celebrate their shared love of Latin American music. | Ricardo Villalobos / Umho: Melo de Melo EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22640-melo-de-melo-ep/ | Melo de Melo EP | Two decades on, Ricardo Villalobos is well into the “Friends & Family” phase of his career: The Chilean-German electronic musician often goes for remixes or collaborations—with the likes of synthesist Max Loderbauer, for example, or guitarist Oren Ambarchi—over solo productions. This two-track EP, for Santiago’s Drumma Records, sees Villalobos team with fellow Chilean artist Umho as Ricmho. Like many of Villalobos’ scattered collaborations, you can be forgiven for not recognizing this particular partner in crime: Umho has a scant two releases to his name (which are themselves collaborations) despite a long-running and healthy DJ career.
Melo de Melo feels more substantial, owing to its nearly 30-minute runtime. Uhmo and Villalobos have frequently shared the DJ booth over the years, and the EP is billed as a celebration of their shared love for Latin American music. While Umho’s limited production record makes it difficult to suss out who contributed what, the EP is full of the quick, pitched percussion that dots typical Villalobos tracks. Squint and you can hear a conga, or a timbale, or a maraca, all deployed with a busyness foreign to stodgier, upbeat/downbeat dance patterns. Still, Melo de Melo scans as Latin American in pretty much the same manner all Villalobos productions do.
The A-side, “Por Suerte,” features a resonant ping played with considerable vigor and debatable purpose. It sticks out in a thicket of percussion that, for much of the track, masks a warm, evolving ambient melody. That melody breaks through in the track’s final minute as the pops and clicks fade, churning slowly and sounding considerably more reflective and calm than your average Villalobos work. The EP’s title track (credited only to Villalobos) begins more conventionally, with a steady kick and a sparring match between a conga and a snare. Halfway through, Villalobos introduces a long, evolving sample that sounds like a string quartet being kneaded into itself. By the end of the track, it’s a roughly diced, digitally charred wreck.
It’s a beautiful sequence, one that underlines how Villalobos seems increasingly interested in welding avant-garde composition and dance music. (See also: last year’s Vilod collaboration with Loderbauer, in which the duo wrung minimal jazz out of their synthesizers.) Villalobos remains commendably weird in almost every way, even if, as a project, Ricmho seems only half-formed. Ultimately, that’s why Melo de Melo underwhelms, however slightly: Villalobos has been churning out jammy, crumbling tracks like this for most of a decade at this point, and these are hardly the jammiest, or the most crumbly. | 2016-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Drumma | December 15, 2016 | 7 | 54016b7a-2628-46a3-ac52-cf22f039e267 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
After working with Danger Mouse on their last full-length, Black Keys sound re-energized and playful on their loosest record in years. | After working with Danger Mouse on their last full-length, Black Keys sound re-energized and playful on their loosest record in years. | The Black Keys: Brothers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14222-brothers/ | Brothers | When it was announced that Danger Mouse would be working with the Black Keys on their 2008 album, Attack & Release, it seemed like a fresh start for a band that had run out of ideas. While DM indeed brought some psychedelic side dishes to Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney's meat-and-potatoes blues-rock table-- a little pan flute here, some spaghetti Western guitar licks there-- Attack & Release had its share of samey-sounding midtempo cuts, suggesting that the duo were content to write variations on the same theme. Subsequent side projects (both worked in Damon Dash's not-disastrous rap-rock experiment Blakroc, and Carney formed Drummer) suggested that they probably felt this creative stagnation, too. As for Auerbach's basically-a-Black-Keys-album solo effort, Keep It Hid: guy's gotta get it out of his system somehow.
New challenges, as well as time apart from their main outfit, have served these guys well. Brothers is the loosest they've sounded since 2004's Rubber Factory. The Keys haven't undergone a drastic sonic shift or anything-- at this point, no one is going to mistake them for anyone else, especially if they keep putting out songs like Brothers' first two singles, "Next Girl" and "Tighten Up". The former is boilerplate Black Keys, complete with a burned-barn riff for a chorus and lyrics about wayward women; the latter, the only Danger Mouse-produced cut on the record, features a whistle-heavy melody that wouldn't have sounded out of place on Attack & Release. But you don't come to the Black Keys for reinvention.
Instead, Brothers finds Carney and Auerbach augmenting their sound with some new stylistic tics, suggesting that they might've learned something from working with Danger Mouse. "Too Afraid to Love You" feels spooked-out thanks to Auerbach's distanced vocals and some haunted harpsichord, while the Jock Jams beat on "Howlin' For You" and "Black Mud"'s winking nod to CCR's "Green River" find the Keys in an uncharacteristically playful mode.
Most striking on Brothers is Auerbach's incorporation of falsetto. The man has honed his speaker-blowing howl for so long now, it's genuinely surprising to hear him try another vocal style. Even more surprising is how good he is at it, too: he's controlled and natural on "Everlasting Light", vibing with high-pitched restraint and turning the tune into a lo-fi T. Rex stomper, while on penultimate track and Jerry Butler cover "Never Gonna Give You Up", he lets loose over a shimmering Motown melody.
If there's one thing that keeps Brothers from jumping the gap between a "very good" album and a "great" album, it's the running time. When it's all said and done, the 15-track set runs almost an hour long, causing one to think that the Keys might have done the best material here a disservice by shoving so much onto one album when they could've easily saved some up for their next release. It makes a skeptical fan like myself wonder if the Keys spent themselves creatively here, and if the next record will just be more back-to-basics trad-blues mediocrity. If the next Black Keys record builds on Brothers, though, they still have some good music ahead of them. | 2010-05-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-05-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | May 19, 2010 | 7.7 | 5402fe9f-1227-4fda-b2e7-c64b0e9614f7 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Chief Keef's Bang 3 has been in limbo since 2013, but it doesn't sound like a too-little-too-late effort. Instead, it sounds like Keef signaling a new beginning. The higher, clearer production values are immediately noticeable—this is the crispest-sounding Keef release since 2012's Finally Rich. | Chief Keef's Bang 3 has been in limbo since 2013, but it doesn't sound like a too-little-too-late effort. Instead, it sounds like Keef signaling a new beginning. The higher, clearer production values are immediately noticeable—this is the crispest-sounding Keef release since 2012's Finally Rich. | Chief Keef: Bang 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20925-bang-3/ | Bang 3 | To some rap fans, Chief Keef is still a reliable wellspring of dense, intriguing street rap; to others, he's a misguided and spoiled ne'er-do-well who has been making sloppy Death-of-Rap mixtapes in his mansion since "Love Sosa" fell off the bottom of the charts. Even a cursory listen to Keef's new album, though, pokes a hole, or several, in the latter diagnosis. Bang 3 is clearly not the work of a contrarian, unfocused artist (or, for that matter, an "outsider" one) actively trying to antagonize and self-sabotage; nor is it an awkward or even phoned-in bid for renewed pop appeal. It's the work of a mature rapper and songwriter, putting the skills he developed over several years spent branching out stylistically to good use.
The release of Bang 3 carries some significance for Keef. This project has been in limbo since 2013; it was postulated first as his sophomore Interscope release, then as an album-turned-mixtape (a kiss-off to label bureaucracy), then, following the loss of his deal, as an independent album to arrive exactly one year ago. Luckily, Bang 3 isn't a too-little-too-late effort like Gunplay's recent, forestalled full-length; instead, it sounds like Keef signaling a new beginning. The higher, clearer production values are most immediately noticeable—this is the crispest-sounding Keef release since 2012's *Finally Rich—*and its well-ironed-out song structures. It feels like a new coat of paint to befit a new partnership: The rapper is in the honeymoon phase of a new deal with Greek billionaire, web entrepreneur, and probable psychopath Alki David's multi-platform entertainment company FilmOn, and the sense that he's getting some new encouragement (and constructive criticism) is all over this confident and studied-sounding music.
On Bang 3, his voice is turned up loud, left untreated and pushed to the front of the mix, highlighting smaller, expressive details in his delivery. He builds energy across verses rather than hammering on one idea, relishing word sounds and inflecting his patterns with a conversational, sing-songy style: "I'm rocking Tweet, beat, skeet, then delete" (from "You"). Often, the fun he's having in the booth is infectious, sellling chancier lines like "Remember having pistol fights, now I'm having food fights/ Now we having rack fights, now we having jewel fights" (from "New School").
For the most part, the production stays behind the rapping, unlike Keef's in-house work on Sorry 4 the Weight and the self-produced Back from the Dead 2. Trusted Atlanta stalwart Zaytoven is here, as is Keef's first and most important collaborator, his childhood ally Young Chop. On "Facts", produced by Glo Gang, he delivers some of his most pointed and emotional lyrics on the album over eerie synth string seesaws.
That said, while these songs feel more well-plotted and pristinely delivered than anything he has released in a while (that is not to say "better"), you still get the feeling they are molded from Keef's first thoughts after stepping in the booth. In this case, this makes for a lot of very good, but only a few great tracks; the rigorously composed '80s-inflected ballad "Ain't Missing You"— with its gunshot timpanis, EKG fluttering, and fierce hook—is a one-off novelty, not indicative of a new, aggressively poppy direction.
Ever since the the sleek pop appeal of Finally Rich, fans have wondered if the rapper will someday make another streamlined, unassailably consistent project. Bang 3 seems to signal that, despite his newfound poise, he won't; he's not interested in that. That's not a bad thing, and it's even something of a relief to not be constantly waiting for some succinct return-to-form moment. The key to enjoying his work is appreciating the sweet spots, the moments where his reckless experimentation and his unmistakable attitude intersect and become more than the sum of their parts. These are tapes you wander into slowly and patiently, bypassing some murkier, hastier-sounding clunkers until you find the music that both sounds like no one else and begs for replays reveals itself. It's usually worth it. | 2015-08-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-08-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | August 13, 2015 | 7.1 | 5404c909-baa1-40f8-874e-6bd14258dbd9 | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
The Snapchat icon’s 10th album is ostensibly an ode to the joys of fatherhood, but its A-list features and slick surfaces are the polar opposite of warm and fuzzy. | The Snapchat icon’s 10th album is ostensibly an ode to the joys of fatherhood, but its A-list features and slick surfaces are the polar opposite of warm and fuzzy. | DJ Khaled: Grateful | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-khaled-grateful/ | Grateful | Since his first child, a boy named Asahd, was born last fall, DJ Khaled has been living in a Huggies commercial—a soft-focus, blissed-out, brimming-with-pride advertisement for the joys of parenthood. Daddydom has been good for the king of the most self-interested social-media platform, Snapchat. Instead of shouting, “We the best,” he’s now shouting, “He’s the best.” Asahd is not only pictured on the cover of DJ Khaled’s 10th album, Grateful, which clearly was named in tribute to him, but he also appears on the cover art for four of the album’s singles, and he’s the subject of three (“I Love You So Much,” “Asahd Talk,” “I’m So Grateful”) of the album’s whopping 23 tracks. The number is meant as a nod to Asahd’s birthday, October 23; the tracklisting was selected in part, DJ Khaled has said in an interview, according to Asahd’s rapturous reaction when Khaled played him potential songs, which is why the boy also has an executive producer credit. Khaled even convinced Chance the Rapper to sing an interpolation of “The Alphabet Song.” In a world where too many kids get too little love, DJ Khaled is obsessed with his son, and that is beautiful.
Unfortunately, very little of that heart made it into Grateful, a bloated album that’s full of too many plastic tracks with a shiny list of features—from Rihanna and Future to Justin Bieber and Calvin Harris, name a big name and it’s probably here—that seem primarily geared toward capturing spots on bland-as-baby-food pop-rap radio playlists.
To that end, Grateful has been very successful. It just nabbed the No. 1 slot on the Billboard 200 charts and already has produced three mega singles, two of which are indeed album standouts: the glitzy “Shining,” featuring the country’s most glamorous couple, Jay and Bey; the pool-party staple, “I’m the One,” with the Biebs, Quavo, Chance, and Lil Wayne; and the dud of the bunch, “Wild Thoughts,” which couldn’t even be saved by Rihanna, Bryson Tiller, and a sample of Santana’s “Maria Maria.”
With the exception of “Wild Thoughts,” the first quarter of the album moves at a good clip. “To the Max” (featuring Drake) and “On Everything” (featuring Rick Ross, Big Sean, and a Travis Scott hook that almost derails the song) are high-octane club hits, their racing pulses a nice injection of urgency in such a long project. After that, however, it’s hit or miss. “Don’t Quit,” produced by Calvin Harris and featuring Travis Scott and Jeremih, is a more sophisticated song-of-the-summer contender than the blatant grab of “I’m the One.” But while its heart is in the right place, “I Love You So Much” comes off as try-hard and saccharine; despite having what should be a dream team, Alicia Keys and Nicki Minaj, “Nobody” never manages to gel.
Many of the songs on the second half slide into each other in a forgettable jumble, but Grateful’s best songs are here, too. Belly is whip-smart and effortless on “Interlude.” “Iced Out My Arms” (Future, Migos, 21 Savage and T.I. all come ready to play) is a woozy post-game song with a sharp edge, an off-kilter lullaby to wind down the after-after-party. Taking the crown, though, is “Good Man.” Imbued with surprising warmth thanks to Cool & Dre, the production is custom-fitted for Pusha T and Jadakiss to drop in and do clean, tight work like the consummate professionals they are.
But Khaled will have to teach Asahd the value of editing and restraint, because the good gets lost here. (Then again, this is a man whose tagline is “Another one.”) Too often, more is just more, and the slickness with which Khaled packages his product feels mass-produced for maximum impact, and calculating in a way that clashes with his fatherly quirk. As it is, Grateful is as over-processed as a Pop-Tart, and we all know Khaled would never feed Asahd one of those things. | 2017-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic | July 8, 2017 | 5.2 | 5405a4e4-679e-46ed-9a34-c2c0b3aeafdc | Rebecca Haithcoat | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca- haithcoat/ | null |
On the stellar and small Electric Ursa, her third album but first to be widely distributed, the Kentucky singer Joan Shelley lets prepositions hang with no object, tucks nouns into vivid verb-less clusters, and prefers pronouns that linger with little clear meaning. | On the stellar and small Electric Ursa, her third album but first to be widely distributed, the Kentucky singer Joan Shelley lets prepositions hang with no object, tucks nouns into vivid verb-less clusters, and prefers pronouns that linger with little clear meaning. | Joan Shelley: Electric Ursa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19828-joan-shelley-electric-ursa/ | Electric Ursa | For an ostensible singer/songwriter, Joan Shelley doesn’t say too much—or at least, very much that’s concrete, direct, or explicit. On the stellar and small Electric Ursa, her third album but first to be widely distributed, the Kentucky singer lets prepositions hang with no object, tucks nouns into vivid verb-less clusters, and prefers pronouns that linger with little clear meaning. Electric Ursa includes only eight tracks, but still, Shelley foregoes lyrics altogether on the mid-album dream, “Remedios”. Instead, she hums a simple melody over banjo, piano and gathering drums, as though she were singing a child to sleep with the help of a rural chamber ensemble.
“There’s so much I’m longing to say, but there’s nothing to decide,” she offers during the hypnotic sway of the love song “Long Way to Night”, as if to apologize for the impressionistic shape of her own words. No condolences are required, really: Shelley’s primary instrument carries both the grain of a wizened Appalachian lifer and the maneuverability of a young torch singer. Paired with a simpatico band of Louisville musicians, her tone gives the words more meaning and weight than additional details or complete sentences ever could. Shelley’s voice fills the space between her pen’s lines.
Several years ago, Shelley recorded a pair of albums with Maiden Radio, a string trio with fellow Kentucky singers Cheyenne Marie Mize and Julia Purcell. They largely covered antiquated American ballads, country tunes, and lullabies, mixing in the occasional original or contemporary number to avoid any old-time novelty pratfall. The tunes of Electric Ursa indeed verify a musical education rich with various transcontinental folk renaissances. “River Low” feels like a letter for back home from a mountain pioneer, confessing both loyalty through love and personal growth. “There’s a calmness in my footsteps, in the new lines on my hands,” she sings with welcome resolve. The closer and title track, meanwhile, shakes with the same bucolic reverie of Nick Drake and Vashti Bunyan, Shelley linking images of “waning autumn light” and “moments given unto the ether” with a see-saw dynamic that makes you lean in close to records like Pink Moon. Her voice rises into sudden, stainless near-shouts and then slinks back toward a whisper. Beneath it, the rippling acoustic guitar of labelmate Nathan Salsburg affords the simple instrument-and-voice affair the ornate elegance of Pentangle.
But the respective placement of these songs at the album’s middle and then at its end feels like a subtle and deliberate revelation. It’s as though Shelley is reminding the listener of her foundation—that is, centuries of Anglo-American songbooks—only after offering a tour of the grand designs it can support. Collectively, those other songs put Shelley in the surprising, esteemed company of recent stateside singers like Sharon Van Etten, Justin Vernon, and Angel Olsen, songwriters who use modest observations as the basis for big and bold arrangements. When Shelley nests her voice inside of Electric Ursa’s more complicated productions, she stuns. “Something Small” begins as a simple acoustic trickle, with drums obediently echoing the strums. It builds one piece at a time, the music mirroring Shelley’s slow, steady feeling of being trapped by provincialism, loneliness and fate. “It’s all laid out in front for you to take it,” she sings in the closing chorus, organ pouring in like a wave of unexpected encouragement. The record’s peak, “First of August”, scans as the more mature flipside to a single from For Emma, Forever Ago, the singer suddenly capable of restraint in the face of complete emotional resignation. Of all Electric Ursa’s songs, “First of August” is the most lyrically elusive, with seasons that seem to obey no calendar, a subject that seems decisively indecisive, and an idiosyncratic style that cuts between hillside patois and sophisticated English. But Shelley and the band—all moping drums, crying keys, hand-wringing electric—make the mix of regret, longing and hope tucked into the lines perfectly clear. The feeling is complete and engrossing, even if the words are not.
Electric Ursa isn’t Shelley’s debut, but it is her absolute arrival. On 2012’s Ginko, issued by the Ol Kentuck label of longtime collaborator Daniel Martin Moore, Shelley worked for similar grandeur. But it felt stiff and forced, as though she had an idea of how she wanted to sound but not the experiences she needed to power it. In the interim, though, something seems to have softened and shifted for Shelley, making her less concerned with the perfection of these productions (there is, more often than not, a ripple of room noise and tape hiss in these songs) than their power. Again, it’s an arc and approach not unlike Van Etten’s, where two relatively minor albums preceded a sudden revelation. Where Ginko was too conscious and precious, Eletric Ursa suggests that Shelley is revealing bits and scraps from private journals, leaving out details to protect or piss off the guilty. Sounds like folk music, after all. | 2014-09-26T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-09-26T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | No Quarter | September 26, 2014 | 7.9 | 5407a38a-9c44-457d-8fff-cf0e965ff7f7 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Three years after "212", her confrontationally profane lead single, Azealia Banks has finally released her proper debut. It's all over the place, with tracks new and old and production that runs the gamut from Ariel Pink to Lone to AraabMuzik, and it functions as a sort of anthology, complete with flashes of brilliance. | Three years after "212", her confrontationally profane lead single, Azealia Banks has finally released her proper debut. It's all over the place, with tracks new and old and production that runs the gamut from Ariel Pink to Lone to AraabMuzik, and it functions as a sort of anthology, complete with flashes of brilliance. | Azealia Banks: Broke With Expensive Taste | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19998-azealia-banks-broke-with-expensive-taste/ | Broke With Expensive Taste | It’s been three years since Azealia Banks sprung up from the New York underground fully formed with "212", her confrontationally profane lead single. "212" was the seed for all of the triumph and adversity that followed—the prodigious rap skills, the casual genre-bending, and the bratty disdain for authority. In its wake, Banks charted a career path typical of a budding rap talent. She dropped the promising, beat-jacking pre-album mixtape (2012’s unrelenting Fantasea) and the compact retail EP of brash originals (2012’s nostalgia tripping 1991). She navigated through mettle-testing beef with her peers. The tiffs were negligible as long as the music was nourishing, and for a while Azealia’s war on the rap establishment was excitingly disruptive.
But as work on her Interscope Records debut commenced, Banks hit a tight spot. The deal soured as her new tracks were met with indifference from label liaisons. Her uncompromising social media demeanor landed her in quaffs both hysterical (See: her merciless ribbing of T.I. and Iggy Azalea) and injurious (that time she defended her right to call Perez Hilton a gay slur), but vocal criticism of Baauer, Pharrell, and Disclosure began to cost her profitable collaborators. Her early career goodwill nearly spent, Banks finally caught a break: Interscope let her out of her deal with the rights to all the songs she’d recorded during her tenure there. Broke With Expensive Taste arrived this month with very little fanfare, its release announced with a simple tweet. Its lengthy gestation is, of course, its chief foible. Older material accounts for roughly half the tracklist, and some of it doesn’t mesh well with the fresher, weirder stuff around it. It helps to see Broke With Expensive Taste, then, as an anthology, The Portable Azealia Banks.
Three songs in, it’s clear why Interscope didn’t know what to do with the thing. Opener "Idle Delilah" bursts in effortlessly crossing elements of house, dubstep, and Caribbean music. It’s followed by "Gimme a Chance", a bass-heavy post-disco romp that takes a hairpin turn into smooth merengue halfway through, as Banks flits from rapping and singing in English to perfect unaffected Spanish. "Desperado" borrows a beat from early 2000s UK garage whiz MJ Cole’s "Bandelero Desperado" as Banks puts on a rap clinic, flaying adversaries in a flow so neat you might miss the fact that every piece of every line rhymes. Her voice is often the sole unifying force from track to track here, and it’s easy to see a label’s trepidation about pushing this thing on listeners who haven't followed her every move. "Nude Beach a Go-Go", for instance, a late album collaboration with Ariel Pink, is every bit the what-the-fuck moment it sounds like on paper.
By the end of Broke With Expensive Taste you’ll come to see Azealia Banks as a dance pop classicist underneath the flailing. The capable but unfussy approach to melody on deep cut confections "Soda" and "Miss Camaraderie" as well as Fantasea holdover "Luxury" and the massive "Chasing Time" showcase Azealia as a singer who’s studied her Robin S. and Technotronic. Coupled with her bullish rhyme skills, Azealia’s chops as a house vocalist make for a true rapper-singer double threat. (Credit is due to Drake and Nicki Minaj, but both sound like they picked up singing on the job.) She’s an angel on the choruses, but for the verses in between, she’s a formidable spitter whose flash and flow are unmistakably Harlem.
The party line among hip-hop aficionados is that New York rap currently lacks a distinctly New York identity. There’s some truth to it. The city’s biggest success stories of late involve locals breaking out by spicing Big Apple grit with outside flavors, from A$AP Mob’s Texas screw fixation to French Montana’s trap circuit traction to Nicki Minaj’s day-glo EDM daze. But the scene in 2014 can’t look like it did in 1994 or even 2004, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Statlers and Waldorfs pining for a new age of rappity boom bap wouldn’t notice a new New York if it came up and offered them molly in a Brooklyn bar bathroom.
Well, Azealia Banks is it, and Broke With Expensive Taste is a reminder that the corner of Harlem that she claims is walking distance from both Washington Heights and the Bronx, where you’re as likely to hear hip-hop booming out of apartments and passing cars as freestyle, reggaeton, house, or bachata. It’s a quick subway jaunt away from the landmark clubs where ball culture persists, as well as perennial dance parties at Webster Hall and the glut of eclectic Lower Manhattan concert venues. Broke With Expensive Taste glides through all of these, just like the faithful 1 train sampled on "Desperado". Both album and the artist revel in the freedom of a New York City where divisions between these sounds and scenes have ever so slowly ceased to exist. | 2014-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Prospect Park | November 11, 2014 | 8 | 540aa0e3-13dd-46fc-990e-482e058f4cdd | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
Two virtuosic performances of a Bach composition by the eccentric Canadian pianist brought Baroque music into the modern era. Together, they explore how art and taste evolve through time. | Two virtuosic performances of a Bach composition by the eccentric Canadian pianist brought Baroque music into the modern era. Together, they explore how art and taste evolve through time. | Glenn Gould: Bach: The Goldberg Variations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23016-bach-the-goldberg-variations/ | Bach: The Goldberg Variations | The press release began: “Columbia Masterworks’ recording director and his engineering colleagues are sympathetic veterans who accept as perfectly natural all artists’ studio rituals, foibles, or fancies. But even these hardy souls were surprised by the arrival of young Canadian pianist Glenn Gould and his ‘recording equipment’ for his first Columbia sessions. … It was a balmy June day, but Gould arrived in a coat, beret, muffler and gloves.” The rest of the bulletin detailed the other peculiarities that Gould had brought along with him when recording J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations for the label.
These were many. Instead of nobly holding his head high with a proper recitalist’s posture, Gould’s modified piano bench allowed him to get his face right near the keys, where he would proceed to hum audibly while playing. He soaked his arms in hot water for up to 20 minutes before takes and brought a wide variety of pills. He also brought his own bottles of water, which, for 1955, was still something that seemed like only Howard Hughes would do. It was these initial, broadly trumpeted peculiarities that helped shape the Gould myth throughout his too-short life, the audacious genius who slightly unsettled everyone around him. Fittingly, throughout the 20th century, there would be no more audacious and initially unsettling act of musical reinterpretation than Gould’s debut studio recording.
With his 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the young pianist made a compelling case for a work that, at the time, was considered an obscure keyboard composition by an otherwise imposing master of Baroque music. Gould made his counter-argument for the piece’s rightful prominence by taking wild liberties with the source. In addition to playing the work on a piano instead of on the 18th-century era-appropriate harpsichord, Gould rushed tempos and varied his attack with aggression. His body flailed up and down his creaky chair, displaying melodramatic physical gestures—the very cliche of a young genius at work. But instead of seeming like an impudent youngster, Gould’s innovations signaled a clear love for the source material. He took the piece’s unusual status—a theme-and-variation work so varied that it could be hard for a lay audience to follow—and realized that it could be performed with modernist vigor, full of wild twists of character.
Gould drilled his famous technique over time, using an obscure practice known as “finger tapping” to produce muscle memory in his fingers—thereby allowing for dizzying flurries of notes with astonishing control and minimal physical exertion. And at a time when the future members of the Beatles were still obsessing over British skiffle bands, Gould was pioneering the use of the studio as an instrument by splicing together different takes: finding startling collisions of mood that could help drive his conception of a work.
In its fervor for relating Gould’s peculiar behaviors, Columbia’s first press release neglected to mention all the substantive ways in which the pianist was revolutionizing the art of interpretation. The critics, however, did notice. Gould’s Goldbergs received a raft of rave reviews from The New York Times, Newsweek, and Musical America, among others. Even writers who were unsure if his was a respectable way to approach Bach’s sublime music counted themselves impressed by Gould’s array of approaches—including his dancing sprightliness, a dashing top-gear of speed, and swooning sense of drama. And Gould proved a forceful advocate for his own ideas about the piece.
In erudite liner notes that accompanied the first LP issue in 1956, Gould writes about the strangeness of Bach’s theme-and-variation work: “...one might justifiably expect that … the principal pursuit of the variations would be the illumination of the motivic facets within the melodic complex of the Aria theme. However such is not the case, for the thematic substance, a docile but richly embellished soprano line, possesses an intrinsic homogeneity which bequeaths nothing to posterity and which, so far as motivic representation is concerned, is totally forgotten during the 30 variations.”
It’s a fascinating read of the piece—even if it seems trollish to accuse Bach’s Aria for adding “nothing to posterity.” (At least Gould was consistent in his dislike of obvious, top-line melodies. He didn’t much care for Italian opera, either.) Still, it’s true that the power associated with the culmination of Gould's Goldbergs—when the Aria returns—has something to do with how far the listener has traveled since the opening. If you want to make that Aria really floor people at the end, why not blow out the contrasts between the variations as you play them?
Gould makes an argument for his own radical vision of how the piece should be played. He sees his own jagged cadence not in defiance of but as a requisite to Bach’s score. Even listeners who put the Goldbergs on as background music are likely to sit up and pay attention when Gould pours it on during Variation No. 5. With that one far edge of intensity established, his ruminative way of handling Bach’s “Canons” is far more seductive. Gould’s lightning-fast runs tend to get all the press, but they cast into sharp relief his poetic handling of the so-called “black pearl” Variation No. 25. The power of Gould’s 1955 Goldbergs comes from the contrasts that Gould chooses to emphasize.
Gould’s first version of the Goldbergs reportedly sold 40,000 copies in its first five years: A considerable amount for any classical recording at any time, but particularly notable at the dawn of the LP era. The pop-cultural primacy of Gould’s first take on the Goldbergs also fostered some detractors, among them some Bach specialists like Wanda Landowska who were also interested in rescuing the piece from its relative obscurity. Late in life, Gould joined their ranks, offering some withering criticisms of his 1955 recording. In 1981, the pianist told the critic and biographer Tim Page that the 1955 handling of the “black pearl” variation had become particularly unwelcome to his own ears: “It seems to say—Please Take Note: This Is Tragedy. You know, it just doesn’t have the dignity to bear its suffering with a hint of quiet resignation.”
The idea of judging his famous 1955 recording on the basis of those criteria seems like a category error—or a set-up destined to prompt a negative assessment of his first record. The latter possibility is at least plausible, since when Gould offered this self-criticism to Page, he was doing so as part of a new publicity campaign. After being so closely identified with the Goldbergs for decades, Gould had made the rare decision to re-record a work already in his repertoire.
His 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations is still recognizable as Gould: the strutting precision and emphasis on counterpoint apparent. So too is Gould’s famously divisive practice of humming along with his playing (a natural trait of Gould’s that seemed to flower into a deliberate affectation sometime between 1955 and 1981). But in the interim, much else has changed. There’s less swing in Gould’s playing; even when he turns up the tempi, it feels considered and autumnal.
Variation No. 5 is played in 37 seconds, the identical span of time Gould needed to burn through it in 1955. But in the 1981 variations, Gould makes good on his desire for dignity. The 1955 rendition of No. 5 has a compelling, nervy energy; the 1981 version takes a greater sense of self-possession. The ability to find that much expressive room inside a similar tempo resulted in Gould’s second masterstroke with the Goldbergs. This range of musical investigation signals something profound. Two different approaches to the same notes can say a great deal about how one ages and how tastes can move over time.
Gould died just days after Columbia released the second Goldberg set. His death enhanced the idea of this being a grand, final statement—as though touching the work again had created a fateful resolution for his startling debut. But even if Gould were still with us, the 1981 Goldberg performance would sound necessary. Here, Gould luxuriates in the stately character of the “French” overture (No. 16)—and its pivot away from the prior, minor-key canon—with greater pomp than on his first try. It’s just that the fun never spills over into abandon, as on Gould’s first pass. For all his eccentricities, Gould’s most striking trait may have been his ability to revise his own carefully considered understanding of a work that was important to him.
Both interpretations have their uses. Along with Bob Dylan’s “Love and Theft”, which I’d purchased at 12:01 a.m. on September 11, 2001, at the Virgin Megastore in Union Square, Gould’s 1981 Goldberg set was the album I played most often in the days that followed. With the ashen smell still in the air, and the streets south of 14th Street devoid of car traffic, most who lived inside the perimeter established by the National Guard spent some portion of each day balancing requirements of mourning and anger with the search for a new equilibrium—a way to feel less anxious that didn’t also involve pretending that something traumatic hadn’t just taken place.
I owned both versions of Gould’s Goldbergs because I had been told by guidebooks that this was a prerequisite for caring about classical music. (It is.) Until that week, I’d spent most of my time with the 1955 recording—identifying with its direct access to youthful exuberance. Now, however, the high energy of that edition seemed a poor fit to the mood. The dignity Gould had intended to emphasize in 1981 came through clearly.
Record collecting and music appreciation often turn on arguments about rankings, peerlessness, and the greatest-of-all-time. Classical fans play this game as aggressively as anyone—so hard that they occasionally seem to rule out the possibility of any worthy new music being made for traditional classical instruments. And we do this with Gould’s Goldbergs, too. Think fast: 1955 or 1981? Sometimes that’s fun. But these recordings’ mutual portrait of variations held in a single mind—one capable of such deliberate differences of opinion with itself—seems not just like something you’re well advised to have in a music collection, but instead like an approach to life worth exploring and emulating. | 2017-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | null | March 26, 2017 | 10 | 540aead5-8ee8-4a3f-8867-35690cb6a1c1 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | |
The trio’s first album in 14 years is a genuinely compelling new take on the punchy country sound that’s always made them stand out. But its links between the personal and the political are foggy. | The trio’s first album in 14 years is a genuinely compelling new take on the punchy country sound that’s always made them stand out. But its links between the personal and the political are foggy. | The Chicks: Gaslighter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-chicks-gaslighter/ | Gaslighter | Without making explicitly cause-oriented music, the artists now known simply as the Chicks acquired a reputation for provocation. To take on Nashville as a trio of unknown women singers and instrumentalists requires guts, and they always appeared fearless—a defiant posture in itself. Seemingly uncompromising, they won over country’s capital with catchy, bold music that hewed to the genre’s strong roots while simultaneously propelling them to megastardom.
But lead singer Natalie Maines’ offhand comment objecting to the Iraq War in 2003 changed the group’s relationship with Music Row entirely. What had been seen as titillating spunk was suddenly an existential threat, a gauntlet thrown down in a genre where the most widely accepted political statements are conservative. The response was so virulent that it made the mere existence, and persistence, of the Chicks a protest—one that defined their acclaimed 2006 comeback album, Taking the Long Way, and its oft-punned lead single “Not Ready to Make Nice.”
Now the Chicks are finally back with Gaslighter, a follow-up that, for better or worse, is philosophically unmoved. Their dukes are still up, but in the intervening 14 years their opponents have left the ring. Now their battles are scattered, with what seem to be good intentions sometimes awkwardly and ineffectively conveyed along the way. While they’re ready to fight on matters personal and political with the same jaw-dropping technical skill that’s always made them stand out, it’s with little of the incisive clarity and precision that defines their best work.
Take “Gaslighter,” the album’s opener and lead single. The exceptionally bright track has the same outspoken tone, vocal harmonies, and foot-stomping chorus of some of the Chicks’ most beloved songs. But its central, titular refrain relies on the implications of “gaslighter,” the runner-up for the 2018 word of the year, for a hint of subversion—even though its overuse in contemporary political rhetoric has sapped the term’s power.
While the song seems to be about Maines’ ex-husband, it serves the Chicks’ political position as well. “I think most everybody has a gaslighter in their lives somewhere,” the band’s Emily Strayer told the Associated Press. “But, yeah, it was so weird how it echoes our current administration.” In trying to offer a righteous indictment, “Gaslighter” ends up suggesting a depressingly familiar trope: how Americans oversimplify political alignment by looking at it through the lens of their romantic lives.
The trite, foggy expression of the very real links between the personal and the political continue back-to-back on “For Her,” an ostensibly encouraging song that Maines directs to her younger self before reverting to rallying cry cliché (“Stand up, show up/For her, for her”), and “March March,” a performative protest song that name-checks a laundry list of contemporary issues including gun violence, global warming, and underfunded public schools without convincingly engaging with any of them. Notably absent from its concerns is systemic racism, a possible oversight that the group attempted to address with a video spotlighting the names of Black people killed by police and otherwise, released amid protests following the death of George Floyd. And though Maines told the New York Times the group had “wanted to change it years and years and years ago,” the Chicks only dropped “Dixie” from their name mid-album rollout, after those same protests prompted new conversations around Confederate monuments and symbolism.
These aimless attempts distract from some of the more interesting aesthetic experiments on the album, which was produced by the Chicks in partnership with pop monolith Jack Antonoff. “Texas Man” and “Tights on My Boat” both strip the Chicks’ sound down to its essence to great effect—banjo, strings, and the group’s vocal harmonies filtered through a pop groove and otherwise left alone is a genuinely compelling new take on the punchy country sound they spent a decade’s worth of albums cultivating. Beachy hymn “Julianna Calm Down” is a signature anthem that’s fully outside of country, but in a way that doesn’t feel forced. All three, co-written by buzzy hitmaker Julia Michaels, also have some of the album’s most distinctive hooks.
The group’s core elements—Maines’ singular voice, those crystalline harmonies, their remarkable talent as instrumentalists—endure, and because of that, much of the album charms. What’s missing, despite a team that includes some of pop’s most sought-after collaborators, are memorable songs that stand up to the sky-high bar the Chicks set for themselves all those years ago. Without a clear target, their formerly devastating blows just don’t quite land the same way.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Columbia | July 22, 2020 | 7 | 540d5d48-c036-4fa6-af5e-d14a6b253dc7 | Natalie Weiner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/natalie-weiner/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit U2’s daring 1993 album, a staggeringly weird and strangely intimate political pop experience. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit U2’s daring 1993 album, a staggeringly weird and strangely intimate political pop experience. | U2: Zooropa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/u2-zooropa/ | Zooropa | Around the world, a resurgence of fascism. In Germany, gangs of skinheads brutalize immigrants. In France, Le Pen’s far-right Front National brings hate to the ballot box. Muslims die, en masse, in intractable foreign wars, and their deaths slip from the front page to the second. So much news. So much of it bad. All of it relayed to us, instantaneous, on bright, beguiling screens.
So goes the introduction to nearly every review of U2’s Zooropa published in 1993. Very little has changed if we’re talking geopolitics; everything has changed if we’re talking U2. Zooropa wasn’t the band’s last risky move—that would be the 1997 flop Pop, or maybe the non-consensual downloading of 2014’s herpetic Songs of Innocence onto every iPod in the free world—but it was, probably, their last successful one. The album’s sleeve is a bright collage of purples and pinks, blues and yellows; on every album since, they’ve opted for greyscale.
Zooropa was born on a break between legs of Zoo TV, a tour-as-television-spectacle spanning continents and playing provocatively with light and color and character. U2 intended to record a companion EP to Achtung Baby, something to spur ticket sales as Zoo TV continued into its second year. Instead, they made an odd hybrid of live album and avant-garde experiment. Recording engineer Robbie Adams fashioned loops of music from Zoo TV soundchecks; aided by producers Flood and Brian Eno, the band turned these loops into strange new songs unmoored from genre. “Yeah, ‘alternative,’” said Bono, rolling his eyes as he bested Nirvana, R.E.M., and Smashing Pumpkins for Best Alternative Music Performance at the 1994 Grammys. Maybe he’d have preferred to lock horns with Ozzy Osbourne and Meat Loaf in the rock categories.
There’s a bit of bog-standard rock balladry on Zooropa, but it is, otherwise, a record of staggering weirdness. On the lead single, “Numb,” The Edge reads a dystopian laundry list in staid monotone: “Don’t answer, don’t ask, don’t try and make sense,” Bono wails in operatic falsetto. Deep in the mix, a member of the Hitler Youth hits a drum in a sample from Leni Riefenstahl’s propagandistic Triumph of the Will. (On the Zoo TV tour, U2 had used footage from the film in anti-fascist video collages full of burning crosses and swastikas.) Following the grim “Numb” is “Lemon,” a song in which Bono grieves for his mother, though you’d never guess it from the way he coos “whisper” and “moan,” sounding a little like Donna Summer, a little like Prince. A toy piano tinkles over the voyeuristic “Babyface.” A brass sample, sourced from the 1978 Soviet folk compilation Lenin’s Favourite Songs, opens “Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car.” Strangest of all, Bono cedes lead vocal on the final track to Johnny Cash, who walks like a Colossus over the hymnal static of “The Wanderer.”
Odd as these songs were, they fit perfectly into Zoo TV’s post-apocalyptic assault on the senses. The band’s mainstays wound up sounding silliest. The celestial opening of “Where the Streets Have No Name,” the Martin Luther King, Jr. sermon punctuating “Pride (In the Name of Love),” the gorgeous addiction-dirge of “Running to Stand Still”—all were wildly incongruous with the sight of square-jawed Bono covering Elvis in gold lamé fuck-me pumps and little red devil horns. The alternate reality of this tour was so complete, so utterly impenetrable, that the traditional became aberrant. Bono delighted in donning those horns, that lipstick, and transforming into his devilish alter ego, MacPhisto. Inspired by C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, Bono sought to put his own spin on James 4:7: mock the devil, and he will flee from you. MacPhisto is Satan as pithy, aged Vegas lounge lizard. He cracks wise; he congratulates the Vatican for doing his work for him. When Zoo TV played Bologna, MacPhisto placed a telephone call to Alessandra Mussolini onstage, and left a message on her answering machine: “I just wanted to tell her she’s doing a wonderful job filling the old man’s shoes.”
Bono’s nightly dance with the devil, though parodic, did rankle some of his more devout followers. U2 has been a band of unabashed religiosity since their very inception, singing in liturgical Latin and offering post-punk takes on Psalm 40. But their Christianity has very little in common with the North American evangelical breed. The band formed in Dublin at the very height of the Troubles. English bassist Adam Clayton and Welsh guitarist The Edge are both Protestants, while drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. is Irish Catholic. Bono’s home was interdenominational—his mother Anglican, his father Catholic. And so, in U2’s catalog, faith supersedes denomination, and the band is unafraid to denounce the pain wrought by organized religion. For nearly every worshipful “Yahweh” in U2’s catalog, there is some other vent for disbelief—a “Wake Up Dead Man,” an “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” a “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Bono sang hymns, but he took unapologetic shots at snake-oil televangelism, too: “The God I believe in isn’t short of cash, mister.”
What distinguishes Zooropa from these moments of religious critique is the album’s streak of genuine agnosticism. MacPhisto may have been satirical, but “The First Time” is deadly serious, imagining a prodigal son who returns only to reject his father’s love:
My father is a rich man
He wears a rich man’s cloak
He gave me the keys to his kingdom
Gave me a cup of gold
He said, “I have many mansions
And there are many rooms to see.”
But I left by the back door
And I threw away the key
The song, says Bono, is about losing one’s faith. “I’m very sympathetic to people who have the courage not to believe,” he said, in the 2006 memoir U2 by U2. “I’ve seen a lot of people around me have bad experiences with religion, be so badly abused they feel they just can’t go there anymore, which is a shame.” For a celebrity Christian of Bono’s caliber to suggest that abandoning faith is “courageous,” that “throwing away the key” is a principled act of love—this was, and remains, genuinely radical. “For the first time,” he sings at the song’s end, “I feel love.” Bono is not rejecting the Church here, and he is not rejecting Tammy Faye Bakker; he is rejecting the love of God. He is looking, instead, for human intimacy.
Toward the end of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, another wildly experimental ’90s meditation on the addictive allure of television which remains thumpingly relevant in 2020, a man swears he’ll leave the priesthood unless his brother can convince him of humanity’s goodness. This priest proposes a test: His brother must sit on the floor of a subway station and beg—not for money, but to be touched. If even one single person deigns to reach out and lay a hand on him, then mankind is worth saving, not yet beyond salvation. After nine long months on the dingy floor of Boston’s Park Street Station, a handshake finally arrives, proffered by a child: “only 14 and largely clueless… about defensive strategies outside T-stations,” having “no one worldly or adult along with him there to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a simple handshake or High Five shouldn’t automatically be honored and granted.”
The conclusion Wallace reaches here is very like the one U2 arrive at in the songs of Zooropa: organized religion is not a guarantor of sanity and wellness; human touch is, even if it comes at great personal cost. “The Wanderer” of Johnny Cash’s closing track is not out to find God, but “to taste and to touch and to feel as much as a man can”—at least, “before he repents.” This emphasis on the sensual, the physical, recurs throughout Zooropa, and not just as a counter to religious abnegation. The band warns, just as Wallace did, of the suffering that results when people are subsumed by their screens. Whether Bono is masturbating to a video vixen with “bright blue eyes” on “Babyface,” or weeping over a tape of his mother, on “Lemon,” it is abundantly clear that no amount of virtual intimacy holds the power of one real kiss, one last hug.
For U2, this idea was a genuine political commitment. In the latter days of the carefully constructed Zoo TV tour, the band set aside time for unscripted video calls, via satellite, to a besieged Sarajevo. Long before the ubiquity of Skype and Zoom, these video calls were genuinely novel—conversations held in real time, as intimate as any dialogue broadcast on a Jumbotron can be. The suffering people of Sarajevo became as real to the cheap seats as the band itself. Participants in these calls confronted the complacent West directly, forcefully. “You’re all having a good time,” said a group of Sarajevan women, one night, via satellite, to a crowd at Wembley Stadium. “You’re going to go back to a rock show. You’re going to forget that we even exist. And we’re all going to die.” It was a profoundly uncomfortable moment; “the show,” according to manager Paul McGuinness, “never recovered.” As the video-call ended, and the women on the screen faded from view, Bono turned to a silent stadium. “Tonight,” he said, “we should all be ashamed to be European.” In the absence of Jesus, every person in the stadium was forced to lay hands on the leper.
U2 would never ask their audience to confront atrocities like this again. In the mid-2000s, their vacuous activism came with consumerist demands: to purchase (RED) products, to view the Live 8 broadcast, to sport a snow-white Make Poverty History bracelet next to your canary-yellow Livestrong. People who actually lived with HIV or lived in poverty were not the spokespeople of these campaigns; Bono was, posing on the cover of Vanity Fair next to Condoleezza Rice. Though the band still performs the stunning 1995 track “Miss Sarajevo” in live performances, it is now divorced from its original context. If the recent dust-up over Dua Lipa’s pronouncement of Kosovar Albanian indigeneity is any indication, most young people are fully unaware of Serbia’s war crimes. This is history that must be taught; U2, unfortunately, is no longer in the business of education.
But Zoo TV was the perfect blend of form and content for its political moment: a direct confrontation of distant violence, a subversive refusal of God and the Devil both, a hand extended in friendship on a subway platform otherwise crowded with folks hurrying home to watch television. It was wise enough to understand that the future may be bleak, but unafraid to push forward. “I have no compass,” sang Bono, on Zooropa’s title track. “And I have no map, and I have no reasons, no reasons to get back.” He has no religion, either; nor does Cash, wandering at the album’s conclusion. “Jesus,” he sings, “don’t you wait up,” having left his home with “nothing but the thought of you”—you, another person; the same kind, perhaps, who opened the eyes of the narrator of “The First Time.” It is interesting to consider “The Wanderer” against Cash’s end-of-life masterpiece, the video for “Hurt.” Director Mark Romanek films Cash in a Dutch master’s array of delicacies in slow decay; his camera lingers on a House of Cash wrecked by neglect. And yet June is in frame, alive, looking at her husband and loving him. “I left with nothing,” Cash sings, on Zooropa, “but the thought you’d be there, too.” And there, at the very end, she was.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Island | December 20, 2020 | 8.4 | 5413efe4-762b-4e6d-a160-b66fd2307d28 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Though led by a fiery performance from Mike Patton, this Slayer/Retox/the Locust supergroup doesn’t shed much new light on the players involved. | Though led by a fiery performance from Mike Patton, this Slayer/Retox/the Locust supergroup doesn’t shed much new light on the players involved. | Dead Cross: Dead Cross | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dead-cross-dead-cross/ | Dead Cross | On paper, the matchup of Mike Patton with former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo, the Locust/Retox bassist Justin Pearson, and Retox guitarist Michael Crain suggests creative possibilities galore. When Patton recruited Lombardo for his avant-grind outfit Fantômas alongside Melvins frontman Buzz Osborne and Mr. Bungle co-founder Trevor Dunn in the late ’90s, the world finally got to hear Lombardo’s range in settings that were previously unheard of for a thrash drummer. 2004’s Delìrium Còrdia album, for example—a continuous, hour-plus, through-composed piece of music—leaned closer to modern classical than metal or even experimental noise.
Likewise, the Locust and Retox have employed a similarly modernist sense of composition within the tight confines of grindcore and hardcore, respectively. On 2007’s New Erections, for example, the Locust went so far as to frame grindcore as a cheeky but powerful reincarnation of jazz fusion. So it follows that the self-titled debut by Pearson, Crain, Lombardo, and Patton under the name Dead Cross would crackle with irreverent verve. Yes, the music this band makes is undeniably fun—Dead Cross bounces along with so much pep you could almost consider it a party record. But they stick to a fairly straight-ahead take on thrash and hardcore that doesn’t shed much new light on the players involved.
Dead Cross hits on all the elements you’d expect. Lombardo’s signature double-bass drum volleys and warp-speed oompah-oompah-oompah beat are both in full effect right from opening number “Seizure and Desist,” as Patton uses his now-familiar arsenal of throat acrobatics, half-singing and half-shrieking in a pointed indictment against “pimps and johns and patriot scum.” Patton makes reference to “hedge-fund ghosts,” office buildings that blow up, and a “paperwork explosion,” presumably his way of addressing the lack of official accountability and truth in a climate of rampant malfeasance. The thrashing tempo then switches gears, ending in a 40-second ambient noisescape that sounds something like digitized seagull calls echoing over a vast space—the type of thing you’d expect from Pearson and Patton.
As sonic window-dressing, the end of “Seizure and Desist” certainly whets the appetite, but it also highlights what’s missing most in this supergroup. For whatever reason, Pearson and Crain chose not to weave more strangeness into the main body of the songs. Crain in particular seems to restrain his ability to make the guitar speak in a language of exotic, video game-influenced sounds à la Melt-Banana’s Ichirou Agata. Had he pursued that direction with the same relish as he indulges his inner riff-monger on Dead Cross, he could have added a whole new dimension. Along those lines, it’s refreshing to see Lombardo return to his punk and hardcore roots after recent stints with Suicidal Tendencies and the Misfits. The breakdown part on “Idiopathic,” for example, conjures images of mosh pits at old D.R.I. shows, even though it only lasts 13 seconds. But Dead Cross makes it all too easy to forget that it was Lombardo’s inimitable sense of swing that was so crucial in vaulting Slayer to thrash metal’s elite upper echelon.
You’d expect this particular bunch of musicians to push each other out of their respective comfort zones just a bit more—even if Patton came aboard after the music was already finished. Patton is a prolific John Zorn-like figure with an irrepressible appetite for pushing boundaries via collaborations with Merzbow, Rahzel, Kaada, Dan the Automator, the Dillinger Escape Plan, and Zorn himself (to name just a few). He turns in a fiery performance across the record and other than the cover of Bauhaus’ goth classic “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” he also laces each song with timely socio-political commentary, matching the music’s freneticism with requisite disgust for the abuse of power.
Known as a “shit terrorist” during Faith No More’s heyday, Patton revels in scatological imagery on Dead Cross. But he also shows a sense of concern we haven’t quite heard from him before, which helps the album act as a reassuring, if musically safe, tonic for the woes of our time. | 2017-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ipecac / Three-One-G | August 5, 2017 | 6.2 | 54186326-38b0-40c3-85ab-f5dde6bee2af | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Despite the ostensibly humanizing presence of Rick Rubin, rock’s patron saint of prestige, these quintessentially Vegas showmen still sound like they’re firing their emotions out of a T-shirt cannon. | Despite the ostensibly humanizing presence of Rick Rubin, rock’s patron saint of prestige, these quintessentially Vegas showmen still sound like they’re firing their emotions out of a T-shirt cannon. | Imagine Dragons: Mercury – Act 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/imagine-dragons-mercury-act-1/ | Mercury – Act 1 | There have been other rock bands from Las Vegas, but none have embodied the city’s essence like Imagine Dragons. Packed with all the pyrotechnics and budget-busting pageantry of the Strip, each of the band’s albums has played like an imagined Cirque Du Soleil production, as if they were designed not for stereos but for stages. If you’d never seen a picture of frontman Dan Reynolds before—and, despite this band’s monumental success, a lot of people haven’t—you might guess he looks like Criss Angel.
That embrace of brute-force spectacle has made Imagine Dragons one of modern rock’s few true blockbuster attractions, one of the most streamed bands of the Spotify era. But monetizing music isn’t the same as making people care about it. With no central personality for fans to feel truly vested in, the band can seem as anonymous as the black-shirted techies that strike the Wynn Encore Theater each night. On their fifth album, Mercury – Act 1, Reynolds works to change that, teaming with rock’s patron saint of prestige, Rick Rubin, for a humanizing makeover, complete with the requisite songs about suffering and mortality that Rubin demands from all of his charges.
Rubin’s presence softens Imagine Dragons’ sound in places, and after so many albums that played like the THX sound effect drawn out for an excruciating 50 minutes, that’s a welcome change of pace. In rare moments, Reynolds’ Rubin-mandated vulnerability works to his favor, especially on album highlight “Wrecked,” which he wrote about losing his sister-in-law to cancer. Here his clumsy lyricism, usually a liability, becomes an asset. When he sings, “We were there for the ups and downs/And there for the constant rounds of chemo,” it’s touching in its plainspokenness.
Overstatement is still this band’s very reason for being, though, so for most of Mercury they fire their emotions out of a T-shirt cannon. Reynolds’ snarl-yell, his signature since “Radioactive,” is one of the most grating sounds in popular music, and he goes absolutely nuclear with it on “Dull Knives,” which stews in wall-punching rage even as it pleads for empathy: “I’m crying for help, it’s such a cliché/Invisible pain, it’s filling each day.” Even worse is “Cutthroat,” a fuck-shit-up, you-want-a-piece of-me Woodstock ’99 throwback that’s the most dirtbag thing Fred Durst never wrote. Ironically, that song is immediately followed by one called “No Time for Toxic People,” a true Spider-Man-pointing-at-Spider-Man moment: If you’re looking to cut toxic people out of your life, try starting with the ones who wrote “Cutthroat.”
Elsewhere the band’s genre hopping, the secret sauce behind their billions of streams, leads to some truly stupefying combinations. With its pillow-humping synths, “Monday” is a sleazier rewrite of Muse’s “Madness,” while the hip-hop experiment “Follow You” sounds like Post Malone covering Queen at karaoke. Dopier still is the Bleachers-styled “It’s OK,” where good intentions and implied LGBTQ allyship are undercut by goofy ’80s Vacation-soundtrack vibes and the mock-Caribbean accents of its chanted chorus. Did they really intend for the album’s big self-acceptance anthem to sound this much like Todd Rundgren’s “Bang the Drum All Day”?
It’s truly rare to hear an album talk out of both sides of its mouth so incoherently while pandering so desperately in all directions . Mercury tries to be all things to all people, but mostly it’s a headache, a grim study in just how patronizing popular music can be in 2021. Imagine Dragons do intermittently demonstrate some signs of growth, but these don’t count for much; attempts at maturity really don’t go all that far on an album that mostly sounds like a truck full of teens driving by and flashing the shocker at you.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Kidinakorner / Interscope | September 8, 2021 | 4.4 | 541cfb07-93d1-4dfc-a57d-b1bfff63084a | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Adrian Younge has devoted himself to loving recreations of soul through the lens of a hardcore hip-hop fan. On Something About April II, a sequel to his heavily sampled first April album, Younge emerges as someone more interested in creating new classics than new samples. | The multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Adrian Younge has devoted himself to loving recreations of soul through the lens of a hardcore hip-hop fan. On Something About April II, a sequel to his heavily sampled first April album, Younge emerges as someone more interested in creating new classics than new samples. | Adrian Younge: Something About April II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21442-something-about-april-ii/ | Something About April II | For most of his career as an artist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and band leader, Adrian Younge has devoted himself to a particular brand of soul, heavily indebted to the blaxploitation sounds of the early '70s, starting with his soundtrack to 2009's Black Dynamite—a theatrically-released spoof of the genre. While the movie was a sendup of the tropes of all things superfly and jive, the soundtrack was an earnest homage, full of wah-wah's, the vibes and echoes of Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, James Brown, and 24-Carat Black. His next effort, 2011's Something About April (presented by his band, Venice Dawn) was also a soundtrack. Though it was full of psychedelic, trippy funk, doo-wop, and rhapsodic horns, it also called in the talents of the Funk Brothers' guitarist Dennis Coffey and Italian cinematic funkateers Calibro 35, and incorporated lessons learned from studying Ennio Morricone, resulting in a project that was more tender and nuanced. But the film—about a love affair between a young interracial couple in the '60s—did not exist, and the album brought to the fore Younge's "extreme obsession" (his own words) with the soundtrack format.
Something About April II represents a return to this love for Younge, who masterminded two audio stories of Shaolin soul fronted by Ghostface Killah (Twelve Reasons to Die and its sequel), as well as projects with Souls of Mischief and the Delfonics in recent years. Where A**drian Younge Presents the Delfonics showcased what Younge was capable of as a producer when aided by strong songwriters, April II highlights his accomplishment on his own terms. For all of his leanings on history and reverence for the musical past, Younge has always been a child of hip-hop. The first April record was crafted by someone clearly in love with breakbeats and seemed to aspire to become new sources for crate diggers. (Tellingly, that album was used as source material twice on Jay Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail—"Picasso Baby" and "Heaven"—and Younge's compositions provided the samples for DJ Premier's and Royce da 5'9"'s PRhyme album.) But on Something About April II, Younge emerges as someone more interested in creating new classics than new samples.
As always, the music here leans heavily on a roughly five-year slice of Black soul from '68-'73 with Younge helming a Hammond organ, Fender Rhodes piano, vibraphone, and the Selene, a one-of-one hi-tech lo-fi Mellotron keyboard of his own creation. But the songs here are more fully formed than anything he's done on his own. "Sandrine," featuring frequent vocal collaborator Loren Oden, is breezy, with acoustic guitar and a lyrical confidence unseen in Younge's earlier work. "Let's treasure every moment that we share/ Cherish what we have for all time," Oden sings, stretching out and deepening the last two words into a small riff that sounds like it belongs in another song, but fits perfectly. A pair of duets by Laetitia Sadier (of Stereolab) and Bilal—"Step Beyond" and "La Ballade"—benefit from Sadier's cool phrasing, placed atop deep bass grooves that are smart enough to play the background and strong enough to disappear when they're not needed. When Younge revisits blaxploitation aesthetics—"Winter Is Here," with Israeli singer/songwriter Karolina; "Magic Music" featuring Raphael Saadiq; Karolina and Sadier's "Hands of God"—it's with an obeisance that dares to push things outward into soaring vocals and complex arrangements, making everything sound familiar and new.
The music on Something About April II, although teasingly short—most numbers here clock in under three minutes—sounds like music for music's sake, not existing solely for samples or as reverence. Even when left largely to his own musings—on the instrumental "Sea Motet" and the sparsely accented "April Sonata"—Younge presents whole thoughts that move with a fluidity that he's seldom exhibited in the past. In short: he's gotten better at everything he does. | 2016-01-21T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-01-21T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Linear Labs | January 21, 2016 | 8 | 5421ea7d-0323-4aa2-b854-01317183337c | kris ex | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kris-ex/ | null |
The Newark rapper is as cold and calculating with people as he is with his money. Everything’s an asset or a liability, no in between. | The Newark rapper is as cold and calculating with people as he is with his money. Everything’s an asset or a liability, no in between. | Mach-Hommy: Bulletproof Luh | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mach-hommy-bulletproof-luh/ | Bulletproof Luh | Mach-Hommy thinks a lot about what his labor is worth. Very little of the Newark MC’s music is available online, and the physical editions are always limited. His last project, the seven-track EP Fete Des Morts AKA Dia De Los Muertos, mostly produced by Earl Sweatshirt, costs $111.11 to download on Bandcamp. If you don’t know anything else about Hommy, that’s pretty much by design: He’s done only a handful of interviews, and in those few he’s revealed almost nothing about himself. His songs don’t have videos. He has almost no social-media presence. Rap is mostly a business strategy for him, as he’s made quite clear. “I’m here for the bag, son,” he said when asked what he hoped to get out of his art in a rare interview. “I’m here for the fucking bag of money, you dumb ass.”
Hommy’s latest release, Bulletproof Luh, is one of his more affordable works. Vinyl packages are available for between £40 and £160—yes, those numbers are in pounds. The raps themselves are far from an afterthought, but it’s easy to believe they were created largely with the intention of securing the bag. “They say I’m wrong for wanting all of these things/Gimme my dough, fuck the karma, we kings,” he raps on “Fubar.” His whole method is all about creating value, as he’s put it before, controlling “the dispensation and the interaction.”
Released on Valentine’s Day, Bulletproof Luh is in large part about Hommy’s relationships with the women in his life. These aren’t love stories, though. He’s as cold and calculating with people as he is with his money. Everything’s an asset or a liability, no in between. On “Grease,” he spits game at a potential partner, then lays out the prerequisites for being with him, which mostly just means understanding she isn’t a priority. “Regina” takes the persuasion a step further, addressing his target by name and flattering her. She loves coke, but she never bought crack from Hommy, which seems to impress him. “Yvonne” delves into the backstory of a woman who’s described as a femme fatale using her influence to manipulate powerful men. “Everybody knows that girls with big smiles/That wear nice clothes run the world with style,” he raps on “Open Sesame.” Hommy seems infatuated with these women, fixated enough to be intrigued by them but not enough to love them.
As always, he’s meticulous with his raps. His verses are often transactional, sometimes even economical, both in how he writes and how he interacts with his characters. His stories are compact, packed with info, yet they remain loose and free-flowing, taking natural turns. It’s the little things that give them dimension. His descriptions are vivid, particularly when they’re delivered as quick asides. “My white ingenue/Au jus, it’s too gushy,” he raps on “Regina,” dipping in and out of French; “Shawty got legs like fine Cabernet,” he casually mentions at the start of “Open Sesame.” On “Honey Roasted,” Hommy’s jetsetter raps snap in and out of place as he interpolates John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and spits breathless phrases with ease. His flashbacks mimic the shades of memory: Some details are crisp and others are vague, worn down by time. “My favorite cousin gave me a pair of Adidas, Lakers color, and some rubbers/Some gun with seven shots and it was foreign/A Makaveli top to match the decorum/Very fresh with the forums,” he raps on “Apple Juice.” His vignettes have depth and shape.
The production on Bulletproof Luh is rich and expressive. The entire record feels plush, the verses stitching neatly into the fabric of his soul samples. Pitched voices wail as he strings together come-ons and sells his playboy persona, on “Apple Juice” and “Yvonne,” especially. There’s no outsourcing here: As his Bandcamp page puts it, all of the songs were “produced by Mach-Hommy for Mach-Hommy,” as if he’s Marc Jacobs, taking full credit for his work. Hommy is constantly letting listeners know he has both creative control and quality control. Everything about his music exemplifies his core belief: Build something and make your own value. | 2018-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Bad Taste | February 20, 2018 | 7.4 | 5422262f-7e89-4a97-8ad2-4e818195f7a3 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Madonna’s spectacular fourth album revealed just how grand, artistic, and personal a pop star could be at the very height of her fame. | Madonna’s spectacular fourth album revealed just how grand, artistic, and personal a pop star could be at the very height of her fame. | Madonna: Like a Prayer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madonna-like-a-prayer/ | Like a Prayer | Today is Madonna Day in the Pitchfork Reviews section; in honor of her birthday, we reviewed four of her key records.
Read the reviews of Madonna’s blockbuster 1989 album Like a Prayer and you’ll see a lot of confession-related imagery—not because of how her career had been steeped in Catholicism, but because of the narratives surrounding the superstar as she geared up to release her fourth album. She tried to act on screen in Who’s That Girl and on stage in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow; she turned 30; her tabloid-dominating marriage to bad-boy actor Sean Penn had ended. “Was this to be her atonement?” brayed the subtext.
These were ideal conditions for listeners to use an album by pop’s most notorious—and most famous—woman as diary pages, but to at least one interviewer, Madonna bristled at the concept. “People don’t see that you can take some of your experiences from real life and use part of them in your art,” Madonna told Vogue in May 1989. “They try to make everything an absolute truth.” Yet elsewhere, she also noted that Like a Prayer was in part about her taking greater control of her narrative. “My first couple of albums I would say came from the little girl in me, who is interested only in having people like me, in being entertaining and charming and frivolous and sweet,” Madonna told Interview in May 1989. “And this new one is the adult side of me, which is concerned with being brutally honest.”
While Madonna was no shrinking violet during the first chunk of the ’80s—the decade of Madonna wannabes, MTV Video Music Awards-ready wedding dresses, and “controversial” her officially recognized prefix—Like a Prayer does showcase her growth as a pop artist, from the gnarled guitar that opens its title track all the way through its warped-tape closer “Act of Contrition.” She takes more chances lyrically and musically, and while they don’t always work, they do give a glimpse at her restlessness and increased willingness to take musical chances, whether she’s bringing in Prince or letting her voice’s imperfections into songs or taking on heavy, personal-life-adjacent topics.
“Like a Prayer,” with its lyrics of redemption derived from spiritual surrender or some sort of sex act (or a combination of the two) and roof-raising gospel choir, shimmies and saunters, Madonna using its lite-funk building blocks to anchor a giddy sing-along. “Express Yourself” is led by one of Madonna’s most bravado vocals, ready-made for lustily singing along with in a mirror or on a tense solo elevator ride. Though it’s worth noting that the version on Like a Prayer sounds anemic compared to the utterly superior Shep Pettibone single remix, which foregrounds the cowbell and makes the bouncing-ball bassline a go-on-girl counterpoint to Madonna’s message.
“Till Death Do Us Part,” on first blush, comes off like a breakup-themed update of earlier Madonna synth-pop offerings, like True Blue’s “Jimmy Jimmy,” or Like A Virgin’s “Angel.” She sings of feeling bereft over chiming synths and popping guitars—“When you laugh it cuts me just like a knife/I’m not your friend, I’m just your little wife,” she sighs. But the glittery vibes and hopped-up tempo take on a sinister edge in later verses, sounding more glassy-eyed as Madonna’s world-weary alter ego narrates the dissolving love and as the disturbing imagery—fading bruises, growing hate, flying vases—piles up. The final verse, which describes the circular nature of abusive relationships and which punctuates the titular phrase with the sound of shattered-glass, only adds to the song’s despair. Its follow-up “Promise to Try”—a slowly building ballad directed toward a young girl who’s struggling with the death of her mother—is mournful, the loneliness it describes sitting uncomfortably close to the cycle depicted in “Till Death.”
The windswept textures of “Oh Father”—loping pianos, drooping strings—give Madonna’s voice room to move. It swoops and swerves in a childlike voice as she sings of an ambivalent father-daughter relationship. Madonna’s mezzo, which wobbled on low notes and sometimes felt stretched in its upper registers, was often tsk-tsked by her critics, but her vulnerable vocal on “Oh Father” also shows why her music was so beloved; even if she’s singing of characters, as she claimed to Vogue, her gasps and shivers gave voice to the complex dynamic so many children have with their parents—whether biological, by marriage, adoptive, or spiritual.
That was, in part, an outgrowth of Madonna performing in the studio with her backing musicians. “We had every intention of going back and fixing the vocals, but then we’d listen to them and say, ‘Why? They’re fine,’” she told Interview. “They were a lot more emotional and spontaneous when I did them with the musicians… There are weird sounds that your throat makes when you sing: p’s are popped, and s’s are hissed, things like that. Just strange sounds that come out of your throat, and I didn’t fix them. I didn’t see why I should. Because I think those sounds are emotions too.”
The emotions on Like a Prayer aren’t all fraught. “Cherish” is a feather-light declaration of devotion that calls back to Cali-pop outfit the Association while updating Madonna’s earlier exercise in retroism “True Blue”; “Dear Jessie” engages in the reaching toward sounding “Beatles-esque” that was in vogue at the time, pairing fussy strings and tick-tock percussion with images of pink elephants and flying leprechauns. “Love Song,” meanwhile, is a synth-funk chiffon co-written by none other than Prince, one of Madonna’s few pop equals at the time. The two of them feel locked in an erotically charged session of truth or dare, each challenging the other to stretch their voices higher while the drum machines churn. Prince also played, initially uncredited, on “Like a Prayer,” the sauntering pop-funk track “Keep It Together,” and the album-closing “Act of Contrition,” a two-minute maelstrom that combines Prince’s guitar heroics, backward-masked bits from the title track, heavy beats, and its title inspiration, the Catholic prayer of… confession.
So maybe Madonna’s protests that Like a Prayer wasn’t autobiographical were a bit of a ruse—or just another way to keep the minds of America’s pop-watchers thinking about her music as she gave them an album where she was less afraid to show her flaws, more willing to try on new personas that had bits of her selves attached. After all, as she told The New York Times in 1989, “What I do is total commercialism, but it’s also art.” Like a Prayer straddles those two ideals with gusto, with even its less satisfying moments adding to the heat given off by the MTV era’s brightest star. | 2017-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sire | August 16, 2017 | 9 | 54271ea9-7f5e-47d6-9963-fd97b67c1eae | Maura Johnston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/ | null |
A year past Regulate… G Funk Era's 20th anniversary, the hip-hop pioneer Warren G is releasing the G Funk Era Part II EP, which features Nate Dogg on every track. Making a sequel to such a career- and genre-defining record might smack of desperation elsewhere, but Warren G is sincere, and his return comes in the midst of a minor G-funk renaissance. | A year past Regulate… G Funk Era's 20th anniversary, the hip-hop pioneer Warren G is releasing the G Funk Era Part II EP, which features Nate Dogg on every track. Making a sequel to such a career- and genre-defining record might smack of desperation elsewhere, but Warren G is sincere, and his return comes in the midst of a minor G-funk renaissance. | Warren G: Regulate...G Funk Era Part II EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20901-warren-g-regulateg-funk-era-part-ii-ep/ | Regulate...G Funk Era Part II EP | Warren G is one of hip-hop's quietest modern pioneers. Even after he helped Dr. Dre, his stepbrother, carve out a career-long groove with his sample selections for The Chronic, Death Row wanted nothing to do with him until he churned out his own Def Jam single, "Regulate", which they happily slapped their logo on after the fact. The song was his first major hit—his production and collaboration with Nate Dogg on Mista Grimm's "Indo Smoke" notwithstanding—and it has rightfully endured as his biggest.
But "Regulate" also overshadowed the rest of Warren G's output, so cleanly encapsulating G-funk that the song has become a deceptive stand-in for a frequently nuanced career. The album, Regulate… G Funk Era, was also released two years after Dre's solo debut, a post-N.W.A. team effort that pioneered a similar sound and is more frequently celebrated as a benchmark. But Regulate… was still momentous, hyper-local and ripe for national appetite at once, a sudden beam of light pointed directly on Long Beach.
Making a sequel to such a career- and genre-defining record might smack of desperation elsewhere, but Warren G is sincere with G Funk Era Part II. A year past the original album's 20th anniversary, this record may have missed its most marketable moment; in another way it's also perfectly on time. In a recent interview with Billboard, Warren G made a familiar veteran-rapper promise about bringing back a "sound that has been missing [in] hip-hop," but if anything, his return comes in the midst of a minor G-funk renaissance. Kendrick Lamar dabbled with and dissected the genre on To Pimp a Butterfly, and YG hit an unexpected stride over a Terrence Martin G-funk beat for his first post-shooting single last month. Meanwhile, DJ Quik is still tweaking and Snoop Dogg dropped the raps (again) on his last album for a smoother, adult-contemporary revision of the sound. The resurgence is part of a larger refocusing on California hip-hop, but G-funk has been brought along for the ride.
As advertised, Regulate... G Funk Era Part II sticks squarely to Warren G's roots. The production is clean, lush, and familiar, and with four tracks running just under 15 minutes long, it is pleasantly unambitious. There's no misguided attempts at recreating the original, and there also isn't a dud in sight. "My House", the first single, flips Madness' '80s hit "Our House" into a bouncing stomper. It's the same trick Warren pitched with "Regulate" and has been his strength all along, upending weirdly obvious records into unexpected slappers. Nate Dogg rebuilds Madness' hook into a dramatic street anthem and Warren, whose rapping has always been confidently breezy, lays claim to everything in sight.
The EP also serves as a tasteful tribute to Nate Dogg, who is featured on every track. "Saturday", the most upbeat number here, could anchor a barbeque anywhere in California, and Nate Dogg's vocals on the song bear out his mark as a stylistic innovator. Because of his most familiar riffs, Nate Dogg is sometimes pigeonholed as a monotonous baritone, but songs like "Saturday" not only stretch his upper register, they showcase his constant runs and clever vocal riffing.
Thankfully, this sequel rarely fetishizes Nate Dogg or his passing, and most of the songs breeze by with no mention of his death. It's best that way, as a restrained, unceremonious showcase. Jeezy's verse on "Keep on Hustlin'" is an exception, opening with a handful of bars eulogizing Nate Dogg, 2Pac, and Biggie at once before dropping an unfortunately dated reference to freeing Boosie Badazz, who has been out of jail for more than a year. The verse breaks the mood, but it's only momentary, and the rest of the EP could have believably been released at any point in the last ten years. That might be the best thing about G Funk Era Part II: it's not strained or pandering, as much as an effortless continuation. The EP might not be a foundation shaker like its namesake, but Warren G is proof that sometimes music is best when it stands still. | 2015-08-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-08-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | G Funk | August 5, 2015 | 7.4 | 54272bab-7b70-46c4-b85b-9bcad20c57ae | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
The Nashville songwriter returns with a comfortable set of country-pop, colored by grief and new motherhood. It feels matter-of-factly masterful. | The Nashville songwriter returns with a comfortable set of country-pop, colored by grief and new motherhood. It feels matter-of-factly masterful. | Maren Morris: Humble Quest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maren-morris-humble-quest/ | Humble Quest | The Linda Ronstadt-in-Laurel Canyon vibe of Humble Quest might not be what you’d expected from Maren Morris at this point—though given her aerial-ballet career arc, it was hard to know what to expect. She broke out in 2016 with a secular gospel gem (“My Church”), landed a megahit with DJ/producer Zedd (“The Middle”), then joined the Highwomen, a supergroup tribute to, and rewrite of, 1970s outlaw country. Her latest record was made during the postpartum depression that followed the birth of her first child, a darkness compounded by the loss of her longtime creative wingman Michael Busbee to brain cancer and magnified by the pandemic. Yet the music on her third album is largely joyous and bright, both playful and profound, full of easy, comfortable pleasures that feel deeper for being hard-won.
To say Humble Quest is a re-embrace of country is misleading insofar as it suggests Morris, who can conjure a Texan Amy Winehouse, was ever a neat fit for the genre, or that she ever aspired to be. That said, the album is a near-perfect expression of country-pop post-Golden Hour, the high-water mark by Morris’ Lone Star pal Kacey Musgraves: music channeling the ’70s California rock that channeled classic country songcraft. Humble Quest may be filigreed with pedal steel, dobro, and mandolin, but it runs on guitars, synth washes, big drums, and bigger choruses. It’s all shaped with the help of Greg Kurstin, a master of pop-rock-soul triangulation who produced Morris’ hit “The Bones” along with projects by Adele, Sia, and Beck (whose Sea Change and Morning Phase might prove West Coast touchstones as significant for a new generation of country acts as the Eagles’ Greatest Hits has been for the past one).
Foundationally, this is Morris’ first LP without polymath producer Busbee—co-writer of her signatures “My Church” and “80s Mercedes”—who died of glioblastoma in 2019 at age 43. His absence, and his knack for supersizing country rock for the 21st century, shadow the album, starting with the lead track and first single “Circles Around This Town,” a triumphant autobiographical plaint about life as an aspiring Nashville songwriter. Referencing those early hits and echoing their car conceits, it focuses on the struggle to arrive: It’s got “a Montero with the AC busted,” a couple of “bad demos on a burned CD,” slammed doors, and the “couple hundred songs” she had to exorcize to land her breakthroughs, which she invokes just as the music drops out and the chorus surges. Busbee’s absence caps the album, too: The modest, aching piano ballad “What Would This World Do,” penned by Morris after his diagnosis but before his death, asks what the world would do without him. She’s living the answer daily, playing his piano in her basement.
If darkness colors the set, so does motherhood’s rapture. The day she discovered she was pregnant, Morris wrote “Hummingbird” with help from songwriting doulas the Love Junkies: Liz Rose, Hillary Lindsay, and Lori McKenna, mothers all. The acoustic waltz isn’t the best song in the A-list trio’s catalog, but it shows how Morris’ voice can alchemize a workaday lyric, with a sorghum flow rooted as deeply in R&B as the Patsy Cline countrypolitan she grew up karaoke-ing (check her read of “All Night” by fellow Texan, Beyoncé). Gospel and soul mannerisms are a dime a dozen among mainstream country singers, but few have Morris’ nuance and fluency; she already seems like one of the most influential stylists in modern country.
Humble Quest is abetted by Morris’ partner, singer-songwriter Ryan Hurd, who had a Hot 100 hit with last year’s “Chasing After You,” the pair’s first proper duet. Performing it adorably on the AMAs—locking eyes, getting handsy—they became country’s new first couple. Their creative bond seems strong: Besides contributing background vocals, Hurd co-wrote “Circles Around This Town” and “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” on which Morris devotedly rhymes “You like me even when I’ve been a bitch” with “You’re so good lookin’ it kinda makes me sick.” At 6’3” to her 5’1,” Hurd also seems an obvious inspiration for “Tall Guys,” a paean of punchlines by Morris, fellow Highwoman Natalie Hemby, and up-and-coming songsmith Aaron Raitiere.
The all-star co-writing roster seems key to Humble Quest’s hybrid potency. At times, it plays like a concept record about Nashville craft as much as a straight memoir, suggesting these elements cannot be separated in Morris’ world. The lead-off chorus pivots on Morris “trying to write circles around this town,” and the album demonstrates the most recent results. As the line between country and pop gets ever blurrier, Morris’ work with writers beyond the Music Row ecosystem is the most illuminating. Kurstin, who has never before produced a country album, co-wrote four songs, among them “Detour,” a folksy tribute to folks who travel roads less traveled that also credits Australian Sarah Aarons, co-writer of “The Middle” and songs by Khalid and Halsey. Julia Michaels, another writer on “Circles Around This Town,” has shaped megahits for Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber.
Even at a concise 37 minutes, there is filler: “Good Friends” and “Nervous” don’t get past their basic thematic verities, although Morris’ delivery elevates both, the former with warmly tipsy flow, the latter with a soulful rock holler recalling Janis Joplin. Humble Quest notably sidesteps issue-conscious songs like “Dear Hate,” Morris’ poignant response to the 2017 Las Vegas country music festival mass shooting, or “Better Than We Found It” (“America, America/God save us all/From ourselves and the Hell/That we’ve built for our kids”). Her evolving relationship to public activism seems evident in the title track, a country-pop “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” that seems to interrogate her own attempts at allyship, which she aspires to make “more pro-active and less reactive,” as she recently told The New York Times. The impulse is admirable: The music world, like the wider one, needs more folks putting the money where their social media mouths are. And in the end, Humble Quest lives up to its name: 11 lithe songs about love, work, and family, some great, some good, with a coherence and clarity that make it feel matter-of-factly masterful. | 2022-03-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Columbia Nashville | March 26, 2022 | 8 | 54373268-05c6-4309-a157-7725fc628e2b | Will Hermes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-hermes/ | |
Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys' latest solo project was inspired by his recent discovery that he's a descendent of John Evans, a Welsh explorer from the 1790s. The resulting LP is far more robust and widescreen-scaled than the modest, folk-oriented music Rhys has thus far released under his own name, in tune with the Super Furry Animals’ manic genre-blurring, retro-futurist mandate. | Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys' latest solo project was inspired by his recent discovery that he's a descendent of John Evans, a Welsh explorer from the 1790s. The resulting LP is far more robust and widescreen-scaled than the modest, folk-oriented music Rhys has thus far released under his own name, in tune with the Super Furry Animals’ manic genre-blurring, retro-futurist mandate. | Gruff Rhys: American Interior | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19323-gruff-rhys-american-interior/ | American Interior | Depending on which 20th-anniversary thinkpiece pops up in your Twitter feed at any given moment, Britpop was either a prideful display of national unity that provided the triumphant soundtrack to a post-Thatcher England, or a malignant, creatively stunting cancer that’s rotted contemporary U.K. rock music to its hollow core. But even if you lean toward the latter opinion, we can all agree on one positive outcome of the Blur-vs.-Oasis arms race: It injected Creation Records with enough cash for the label to roll the dice on Welsh wackaloons the Super Furry Animals, the rare rock band of the era that was more interested in exploring the future (and all the toxic mobile-phone radiation that comes with it) than repackaging the past. And while they never approached tabloid-level, supermodel-shagging celebrity status, their steady success in the U.K. over the past decade-and-a-half has afforded frontman Gruff Rhys the means to indulge his various whims—which are never in short supply.
Rhys’ capacious curiosity is given even greater room to roam with his latest solo project—the operative word being “project,” in the studious high-school-class-presentation sense. Its roots lie in Rhys’ recent discovery that he's a descendent of John Evans, a Welsh explorer who, in the 1790s, embarked on a solo voyage through America to locate the Mandan, an obscure tribe of Welsh-speaking Indians linked to a 12th-century Welsh prince named Madoc (who, as legend has it, touched down on our continent a good 300 years before Columbus). But rather than just update his Ancestry.com page and call it a day, Rhys booked a tour along the same path his forefather traversed. This wasn’t your standard-issue solo-acoustic campaign, but a multimedia PowerPoint presentation—booked into art galleries and lecture halls—chronicling Evans’ journey, interspersed with new songs inspired by it. Given that Evans died long before the invention of the camera, and no paintings of the man exist, Super Furry Animals’ go-to artist Pete Fowler built a puppet version of his imagined likeness to serve as Rhys’ onstage second banana and travel companion. Because that’s how Gruff Rhys rolls.
The tour is chronicled in Rhys’ new documentary with co-director Dylan Goch, American Interior, which is currently making the rounds on the festival circuit. But for those not in the vicinity of a screening, there’s this namesake 13-song companion album, which provides a vivid retelling of the story even in the absence of visuals. “100 Unread Messages” essentially serves the same function as the Raiders of the Lost Ark-style dot-to-dot maps that plot Evans’ trek in the film, detailing his initial arrival in Philadelphia, en route to St. Louis and up the Missouri River, and then down to his final resting place in New Orleans. But even this straight-forward travelogue is infused with Rhys’ ever-peculiar musings: As he explains in the film, the song is told from the perspective of someone who’s been trying to email John Evans repeatedly but, for obvious reasons, receives no reply, thereby transforming the biography of an historical figure into a comment on the mind-warping effects of internet addiction. And the track’s countrified Krautrock stomp—supplied by excommunicated Flaming Lips drummer and fellow Native-American enthusiast Kliph Scurlock—is far more robust and widescreen-scaled than the modest, folk-oriented music Rhys has thus far released under his own name, positioning American Interior as the Rhys solo release that’s most in tune with the Super Furry Animals’ manic genre-blurring, retro-futurist mandate.
Really, if this had been released as the first SFA album in five years, no fan would complain, as it encompasses several of the band’s signature modes: the ace-in-the-hole ’70s soft-rock throwbacks (“The Last Conquistador”), the nursery-rhyme funk jams with impossible-to-pronounce hooks (“Allweddellau Allweddol”), the multi-sectional, pedal-steeled prog-pop opuses (“Year of the Dog” and its instrumental-coda counterpart “Tiger’s Tale”). And by fortuitous fuzzy logic, the hair-raising, string-swept cavalry charge “Iolo” works as both a nod to the Welsh poet that backed out of Evans’ expedition at the last minute, and a sonic manifestation of Drake’s phonetically related philosophy. But the Evans narrative provides an emotional throughline that connects and grounds this stylistically free-ranging collection—for all his apparent eccentricity, Rhys has always been an exceptional balladeer, and poignant, piano-bound turns like “Walk Into the Wilderness” feel all the more affecting in the light of the real hardship that inspired it.
But Rhys’ affinity for John Evans clearly goes beyond mere blood relations—for Rhys, Evans was the original Welsh punk, who pursued his vision despite the ridicule, incarceration, and isolating loneliness inherent to the mission. And like so many of the punk icons we lionize today, Evans may have been considered a failure in his lifetime (spoiler alert: his story does not end happily), but his work proved highly influential to those that followed: historians claim his hand-drawn maps of the American northwest were crucial to Lewis and Clark’s landmark maiden expedition to the left coast in the early 19th century. With American Interior, Rhys not only follows in Evans’ footsteps but, in his own way, helps fulfill his original mission: If, years from now, social anthropologists note an unusually high concentration of Super Furry Animals fans along the Missouri, we’ll know why. | 2014-05-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-05-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Turnstile | May 13, 2014 | 8 | 543dad7d-2691-4228-8cdb-f0bb540451a9 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
In grappling with the “mess” of our present moment, the punk legend looks relentlessly to the future, and her optimism feels alternately like a salve and a delusion. | In grappling with the “mess” of our present moment, the punk legend looks relentlessly to the future, and her optimism feels alternately like a salve and a delusion. | Vivien Goldman: Next Is Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vivien-goldman-next-is-now/ | Next Is Now | Self-indulgent though it may be, pessimism can feel like a logical reaction to our present. The scaffolding is bowing underneath our feet. What’s there to rejoice about? But Vivien Goldman—erstwhile music journalist, PR maven, and Bob Marley biographer; current NYU professor; and eternal punk legend—looks relentlessly to the future on the aptly titled Next Is Now, and her optimism feels alternately like a salve and a delusion. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion once wrote; Goldman’s latest story is unflaggingly hopeful.
Next Is Now is a linear continuation of Goldman’s oeuvre, threading dubby new wave with funky basslines a la Tom Tom Club and treating spoken-word visions and falsetto melodies like downtown nursery rhymes. Produced by Youth (Killing Joke, the Orb, Paul McCartney) in Goldman’s native London, it incorporates vestiges of ’80s post-punk akin to her 1981 cult classic “Launderette.” Opener “Russian Doll” shares that song’s sauntering reggae tempo, but the record piles on modern flourishes, like the layer cake of synths and embellishments on “Vertigo.” Fans of her work will detect the transition from lo-fi to hi-fi most keenly on songs like “Home,” where the tinny charm of 1981’s “Private Armies” goes glossy, bright chords underpinning electronic blips and a mirage of “A neon whale/Flashing on the wall/At the corner of Houston Street & Broadway.”
But where Goldman’s 30-year-old single concerns itself with a laundromat dalliance, this track—like the others on the album—interrogates the day’s heaviest issues. “He was legal when I met him/Then they changed his status,” the song opens, narrating the tribulations of living undocumented. “My Bestie & My BFF,” which emblematizes the album’s relentless hopefulness, earnestly entwines activism and pleasure. “Meet you at the demo/Catch you at the disco,” Goldman sings, insisting that “My bestie and my BFF/We’re gonna change this mess.” Part of the charm of Goldman’s catalog, epitomized on 2016’s excellent Resolutionary (Songs 1979-1982), is the improvised, off-the-cuff nature of her delivery, which sounds like a punk version of scatting, and here, a lot of that spontaneity is lost—we’re treated to less conversation, more oratory.
The most salient protest songs traffic in specificity, like Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” with its DDT, or Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” its swinging dead so searingly visceral. An anthem like “Bread and Roses” draws its strength from its simple, vivid symbolism. What’s missing on Next Is Now, and what would elevate these songs beyond their earnestness, is a better understanding of “this mess,” whether it’s centered in time and place—America, 2021—or whether Goldman defines it through a personal lens. Gentrification lament “Home” almost gets there with its images of “Alluvial levels of home/Stacked like firewood,” but the chorus—“Home is in the air/Home is everywhere”—feels like a Seussian answer to serious grief.
The ambling “Substitute,” a wistful, bass-led ballad, is the closest we get to a personal lens, and this tighter perspective is a welcome reprieve from the generalities on other tracks. Briefly, she muses, “Why did I walk away/When I wanted to stay?/That famous ambivalence/The best seat on the fence.” Sometimes, the truest story is also the untidiest, and Goldman’s experimental work evinced that; her best songs’ visible bones and unpredictable directions lent them their undeniable allure. Reality itself probably sits somewhere on the fence between pessimism and optimism, and Next Is Now could use more of that ambivalence—less platitudes, more doubt; less triumph, more teeth.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Rock | Youth Sounds / Cadiz Entertainment | August 31, 2021 | 6.6 | 544a35dd-f955-42ff-a553-6b45cb0ed0e1 | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
Nika Rosa Danilova's Zola Jesus project has always been ambitious, and Taiga is her boldest reach yet for the pop stratosphere. Ironically, the album's strongest moments come when Danilova's sights aren't set on pop music. | Nika Rosa Danilova's Zola Jesus project has always been ambitious, and Taiga is her boldest reach yet for the pop stratosphere. Ironically, the album's strongest moments come when Danilova's sights aren't set on pop music. | Zola Jesus: Taiga | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19893-zola-jesus-taiga/ | Taiga | Nika Rosa Danilova's Zola Jesus project has always had lofty ambitions, peaking with last year’s orchestral career-summation Versions and accompanying Guggenheim exhibition. After that, it seemed like her vision could take her anywhere—and “anywhere,” it turns out, was Vashon Island in Washington, where her latest album was largely written. For inspiration, she reached farther out still to the taiga—a type of forest typically found in Russia, desolate enough to border tundra and resilient enough to cover large swaths of the earth. “I like that idea that [the taiga is] full of life—it’s not desert. It’s very much full-blooded, but no one’s civilizing it,” Danilova told Fader earlier this year, and indeed, the taiga’s as fitting a metaphor for Zola Jesus’s music at its best as anyone could produce: cold like a mountain, brutal in its inhospitality, but life-affirming if you take the time to burrow in.
Taiga is Danilova's “pop album,” a tag that's been somewhat overstated. Yes, it's her first full-length on the relatively deep-pocketed Mute, as well as her first with co-producer Dean Hurley (David Lynch, Danger Mouse); and, yes, she told Billboard that she wanted the album to top the charts. But Taiga doesn't sound perky, lightweight, or even radio-ready. Lead single “Dangerous Days”, originally written for the 2011 LP Conatus, has the makings of pop: a gentle throbbing beat, post-chorus synth comedowns, and lyrics that suggest a sideways view of a seize-the-day message. But it’s no closer to dance music than Conatus’ “In Your Nature”, and maybe even less hooky than fellow Conatus cut “Vessel”.
If Taiga nods at pop, it’s mostly in the songwriting–more streamlined, less atmospheric–and Danilova’s vocals, which are cleanly produced and more accessible. She’s mentioned studying Rihanna in particular, and you can hear it in the low, “Diamonds”-smacking strain of “Hunger” ; pop-approaching styles are evoked elsewhere in the vocal swoops and R&B curlicues of “Go (Blank Sea)”, the steady handclaps of “Hollow”, and the gentle-but taunting rhythm of “Dust”.
Taiga's strongest moments actually come when Danilova's sights aren't explicitly set on pop music. True to its title, “Hunger” sounds emaciated, with fuzzy brass, vague hints of a string section, and exhausted, skittish vocals; even the percussion break sounds like it’s been worn to the bone. Despite the pep-talky lyrics, it doesn’t sound like an anthem so much as a mantra clung to, half-breathless, during a fight. (“I’m not getting younger/ I use it, abusively,” is even more striking of a lyric when remembering that 25 is a fairly young age to mind the clock this desperately.) If “Hunger” sounds starved, much of Taiga sounds over-full, and not necessarily in a bad way: “Ego” calls back to Conatus by wielding film-score ambience to impressive effect, and the opening title track sets the stage with atmospherics, drops a drum-and-bass loop over it like sudden light, then stops things short with an imposing tectonic plate of a brass theme.
But too many songs on Taiga come across as filler—too small and formulaic to impress at "taiga" scale, but too leaden to reach anthemic heights. “I wanted to make a huge pop song that would break in and reach people I've never been able to reach,” Danilova told Pitchfork earlier this year. In reality, pop's never been that far of a reach for her, so what’s most frustrating about Taiga is how much more huge it could be. | 2014-10-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-10-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mute | October 8, 2014 | 5.9 | 544cfed0-8cc3-4585-824c-9cf2b16d578d | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The Griselda rapper’s latest album accentuates many of his strengths, highlights no unknown weaknesses, and is peppered with some of the finest tracks of what will be remembered as a golden era for The Butcher. | The Griselda rapper’s latest album accentuates many of his strengths, highlights no unknown weaknesses, and is peppered with some of the finest tracks of what will be remembered as a golden era for The Butcher. | Benny the Butcher: Pyrex Picasso | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/benny-the-butcher-pyrex-picasso-ep/ | Pyrex Picasso | It’s easy to dismiss a rap crew’s next-in-line as a second-rate sidekick. Benny the Butcher sought to establish himself on Griselda Records around the time his cousins—company founder Westside Gunn and Conway The Machine—were hitting new peaks in their ascent. Benny, too, had spent years battling his way through the East Coast rap metro, like a hip-hop Doomguy. While Gunn and Conway recast Buffalo, New York as a gangster rap principality, optics made it seem like they were bringing a fortunate family member into the fold. But here’s the thing: Benny’s 2018 album Tana Talk 3 was a bit of a genre classic, a brutal piece of rap-noir drama over The Alchemist and Daringer’s concrete-hard beats. The message came through in 400 gigapixels: Benny was nobody’s background subordinate.
Benny has proven himself a man apart by diversifying Griselda’s sonic philosophy. The group has attracted 1,000 Wu-Tang comparisons, which aren’t inaccurate but ignore that Griselda’s grimy boom-bap comes with its own glittering flourishes and high art proclivities. Benny’s music feels less painstakingly crafted than Westside Gunn’s. Instead, he brings the blunt urgency of Kool G Rap, rich storytelling that draws from years of selling heroin, and a taste for beats inspired by the early-to-mid-2000s work of producers like the Heatmakerz and Just Blaze. Recorded in a single day back in 2019, Pyrex Picasso is part of a rush of excellent recent releases from Benny. At just seven tracks and less than 20 minutes in length, the record is skinny, the kind of seemingly inconsequential release that Griselda artists regularly drop between major projects (see Gunn’s Hitler Wears Hermes series). But it accentuates many of his strengths, highlights no unknown weaknesses, and is peppered with some of the finest tracks of Benny’s recent purple patch—an era that will be remembered as golden for The Butcher.
The specter of Dipset is palpable. “Flood the Block” features familiar slapped guitars, dramatic samples, and a reduced focus on bass, with Benny’s deliberate approach even shadowing Cam’ron’s flow. Some may lament that there’s nothing as dark and spectral as, say, “3.30 In Houston,” but for those who miss buying XXL at the bodega stand, Pyrex Picasso will satisfy their cravings. The era-specific production, handled entirely by Chop-La-Rock and Rare Scrilla, is matched with pockets of nostalgia throughout the album. But there’s no Nas-style back-in-the-day sentimentality: “PWRDRL” sees Benny reminiscing about his life when “the Towers fell,” detailing drug trafficking from Houston to Baton Rouge, and declaring, “I’m an old school n***a, my morals come from the past.”
Benny raps reliably about hustling and buying nice things with the dividends. Pyrex Picasso doesn’t feature the most densely detailed narratives he’s ever penned—instead, it relies on grand moments. Take the crushing track “The Iron Curtain”: over a gothic instrumental, Benny describes obtaining his first gun from Conway at age 14. The title track complements his cinematic writing, meshing together several movie scores at once: somber Spanish guitar, dramatic piano keys, flashes of strings that evoke images of 1970s Harlem crime flicks. Here, Benny discusses resisting authorities’ attempts to squeeze him for information—“They tried to get in my brain/Just like a neurosurgeon”—then offers a disarmingly honest summary of his life in crime: “The highs always balance out the lows.” Conway suddenly kicks in the door, veering from describing the violence in Buffalo to bragging about his sneaker collection. (As it happens, Pyrex Picasso was not issued by Griselda Records, but that fact feels irrelevant, particularly with Conway and Griselda affiliate ElCamino making two guest appearances each.)
The final track, “Fly With Me,” deserved to close out a more consequential Butcher album. Over a tweaked vocal sample that channels early Kanye, Benny sounds triumphant, tossing out a smackdown to his haters like it’s nothing at all. It’s the kind of finishing leg appropriate for an epic, which leaves some lingering regret that the songs on Pyrex Picasso didn’t form the base of a lengthier Butcher classic. But maybe “Fly With Me” can be interpreted as a lap of honor on recent wins. In an interview with The Ringer earlier this year, Benny admitted he sees himself as a star. And as hard as it is for 36-year-old street rappers who make music that sounds nothing like the zeitgeist to go global, long may Benny pursue it. Nobody is upstaging him.
Correction: A previous version of this review referred to this project as an EP. It is a full-length release.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Rare Scrilla / Black Soprano Family | August 19, 2021 | 7.7 | 5456f0ff-1002-4b55-9832-2ee7f0575e19 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The Ghanaian American singer’s new EP bubbles and froths with Afropop effervescence. It’s a little more subdued than its predecessor, but no less fluid. | The Ghanaian American singer’s new EP bubbles and froths with Afropop effervescence. It’s a little more subdued than its predecessor, but no less fluid. | Amaarae: roses are red, tears are blue — A Fountain Baby Extended Play | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amaarae-roses-are-red-tears-are-blue-a-fountain-baby-extended-play/ | roses are red, tears are blue — A Fountain Baby Extended Play | Amaarae songs have the icy glamor of luxury photography, but none of the stillness. Guided by her fluid coos, the Ghanaian American singer’s restless Afropop constantly flows and bubbles, liquid and frothy as seafoam. On last year’s globetrotting Fountain Baby, she played a Dionysian priestess, extolling the wonders of pussy and premium goods over beats that bridged Accra, Virginia Beach, and Hokkaido. A line from “Angels in Tibet” captures her constant pairing of opulence and exertion: “Diamonds hit the sweat.” In Amaarae’s music, even the jewels get wet.
The follow-up EP, roses are red, tears are blue — A Fountain Baby Extended Play, is just as soaked and luxurious, though the mood is more subdued. The lyrics aren’t as manic; the songs don’t erupt into mall punk and dream pop; and the samples aren’t as eclectic, but an Amaarae after-party is still a romp. She continues to twist her lithe voice into sensuous and alien shapes, her indelible coolness always stemming from her boundless sense of play. For her, flexing is a love language.
The rich production, sourced from core collaborators like KZ Didit and Kyu Steed, blends alté, highlife, R&B, and house. The songs are svelte, but always textured, the airy melodies and swinging polyrhythms layered with strings, horns, and synths. If Fountain Baby was a flying circus, roses is a homecoming parade, grounded but no less colorful. The wistful “wanted” works a slinky vocal sample, breathy harmonies, and pattering drums into a gentle groove. “I’ll be wanted,” Amaarae and OVO signee Naomi Sharon sing with resolve. The affirmation is vulnerable and cocky, fit to be chanted alone or whispered to a rival.
Amaarae’s longtime admiration of Young Thug is obvious on this record. She raps in double-time on “jehovah witness,” her verses frequently erupting into giddy ad-libs and yelps. On the triumphant “this!” her slippery melodies burst into squeals of delight. “Thirty carat diamonds on my wrist/And I’m a vigilante/No fit close my case,” she shrieks, her pitch and lyrics channeling the incarcerated rapper. She’s not as chaotic or expressive as Thug, but she shares his conviction that perpetual motion is the ultimate freedom.
Of course, sometimes even unbothered playgirls get played. Beneath the splendor and swagger of these songs runs an undercurrent of longing. “Sweetie, darling/Darling, sweetie/Pick up/The phone/And call me when you miss me,” she pleads on the sun-drenched “sweeeet,” like a ghosted lover leaving a voicemail. Pet names and a chippy delivery belie her anxious pining. On “diamonds,” a humid dance cut, gleaming gemstones offer little consolation as a relationship falls apart. “Who’s that you been calling, texting/Shawty, finessing/To love me is a blessing/Guess I never learn my lesson,” she sings with resignation.
Heartbreak, joy, and self-assurance converge on highlight and explicit Jeffery Williams ode “THUG (Truly Humble Under God),” which takes its title from a moment in the ongoing and surreal YSL trial. The ballad is one of the most minimalistic in Amaarae’s catalog; it opens with a sampled prayer for blessings, then builds slowly toward catharsis. She sounds nervous the first time she sings the chorus. “I don’t fold under pressure/I don’t fall under pain/Tomorrow might be better/But I’m looking forward today,” she murmurs into a void of plangent piano and strings. But as the instruments grow bolder and the drums rush in, her voice lifts, and the hook turns exultant, as if she’s breached after a deep dive.
The pop experimentalist is always in pursuit of relief in her songs—through sex, through expression, through motion. But here, confidence alone doesn’t guarantee it, a twist that adds new tension to her bustling music. Amaarae sticks to her signature carefree debauchery for most of roses, but she remains a shapeshifter. | 2024-06-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | June 28, 2024 | 7.8 | 545727d5-4c3e-4842-bcad-5c1aab8512ad | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The Ethiopian cult musician returns with a collaborative full-band exploration that is no less hypnotic than his celebrated earlier work. | The Ethiopian cult musician returns with a collaborative full-band exploration that is no less hypnotic than his celebrated earlier work. | Hailu Mergia: Yene Mircha | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hailu-mergia-yene-mircha/ | Yene Mircha | When Hailu Mergia left Ethiopia to tour America with the Walias Band in the 1980s, he decided to stick around. Moving to Washington D.C., he started a restaurant, managed a club, and formed The Zula band. Any of these ventures could swallow the energy of one person, but Mergia also rented a studio in order to reacquaint himself with the accordion, an instrument he played in his youth. What emerged from these sessions was Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument, a mesmerizing combination of drum machine and accordion improvisations. While the collection was an immediate hit in Ethiopia, it did not find an audience elsewhere, so Mergia quit music and started driving a cab, practicing his keyboard on his breaks. That was the end of the story until Awesome Tapes From Africa reissued the tape in 2013 to universal acclaim, and Mergia went on an international tour. It took time, but his devotion paid off.
Two years ago, Mergia put out his first album in almost two decades, Lala Belu. Joined by Mike Majkowski on upright bass and Tony Buck on drums, Mergia showed his hypnotic powers had only grown during his time outside the spotlight. On his latest, Yene Mircha (My Choice), Mergia leads a larger group of collaborators on an inward journey.
The flute-like rustle on the opening groove “Semen Ena Debub” comes from the masenqo, a bowed lute with one string, which merges nicely with Mergia’s accordion. They trade solos, creating a joyous waltz that breaks into a rousing jam toward the track’s end, and the effect is like emerging from an empty street into a friend’s home filled with familiar faces.
Throughout, Mergia shifts comfortably between the elegiac and the ecstatic. The Rhodes solo that opens “Yene Mircha” seems like preparation for a low-key jazz standard, yet it erupts into raucous horns and dreamy guitar licks. “Bayine Lay Yihedal,” a lucid vamp interspersed with spaced-out snare, provides a brief respite from this outpouring. Mergia’s discipline makes for a series of constrained fireworks—small eruptions that pass you by on a first listen but become unforgettable the next.
Mergia turns “Shemendefer,” a synth ballad by Ethopian pop artist Teddy Afro, into a low-octane burner, keeping only the chorus and surrounding it with light piano and organ and skating along its surface with his plaintive accordion solos. Elevated by his collaborators, Mergia displays the tenacious spirit you expect from a person who walked into a studio to practice the accordion and emerged with a masterpiece. Mergia’s power to transfix seems to grow with the more collaborators he has, and their addition does not detract from his resolute sound. The onetime lone wanderer now leads newfound followers up a trail he cut for himself. | 2020-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Awesome Tapes From Africa | April 2, 2020 | 7.8 | 545e4563-790c-42ce-a3ff-ea5f9bae4f22 | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
The indie rock trio Crying folds the bombast of mainstream '80s rock into their sound, and the results feel like a grinning inversion of the hetero-masculinity that’s often baked into such fireworks. | The indie rock trio Crying folds the bombast of mainstream '80s rock into their sound, and the results feel like a grinning inversion of the hetero-masculinity that’s often baked into such fireworks. | Crying: Beyond the Fleeting Gales | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22548-beyond-the-fleeting-gales/ | Beyond the Fleeting Gales | Knowingly or not, Crying saddled themselves with a lot of baggage when they first formed at SUNY Purchase in 2013. Early in the New York indie rock trio’s existence, guitarist Ryan Galloway took to programming synthesizer lines derived from old Game Boy software, which led many to understand them as a chiptune act. But then their name, and later their association with the Boston label Run For Cover records (“There are a lot of sad men,” Galloway said of the label in a recent interview with Village Voice) have led others to call them an emo band. Neither term is particularly damning in 2016, and they were accurate on some level, at least insomuch as the EPs Get Olde and Second Wind had their moments of sullen introspection and sugar-rush abandon.
But their debut LP, Beyond the Fleeting Gales, is different, folding the big-screen bombast of mainstream '80s rock into their sound. Toting a whole gleaming new set of synthesizers and some surprisingly complicated riffing, Gales transforms the band completely. The experience is sort of like catching a show you used to watch on a CRTV in high def for the first time. Despite the stadium-sized scale of Galloway’s thunderstruck riffs on songs like “Patriot,” a subtlety that was once elided creeps to the forefront. If nothing else, it’s a treat to hear his legato runs sounding more like “Guitar Hero” than the bit-crushed rhythm violence of their older works.
It’s a metamorphosis that’s folded into the lyrics of the record. Even the opening track “Premonitory Dream” seems to acknowledge the shock of personal transformation. Over vaporous synth pads and a guitar riff as hair-raising as anything between Rivers Cuomo and Eddie Van Halen, singer Elaiza Santos finds herself on pausing on the middle of a shoddily constructed bridge, unsure whether to go forward or back. She mulls the “risk of burdening the wood and rope I’d already passed,” and ultimately decides to press on. The ascendant riff takes off once she’s made her decision. This is music meant to soundtrack the delicate process of figuring out who you are in relation to the world around you. Openness, in this case and throughout the record, is rewarded; pushing forward is met with joy.
"There Was a Door” was released as a single on National Coming Out Day and the song is a sort of public affirmation of the self, punctuated in pitch-shifted guitar licks. Like their fellow New York riff-slingers PWR BTTM, their music can occasionally be read as a playful, grinning inversion of the hetero-masculinity that’s often baked into these sorts of guitar fireworks—a surprisingly-radical suggestion that a sweep-picked guitar solo can be for everyone, not just for oversexed cis dudes with big hair.
Beyond the Fleeting Gales is a record about these simple victories, and surprising moments of optimism reclaiming simple pleasures and pressing on in the face of an oppressive world. That’s the message at the heart of “There Was a Door.” You face a threshold; cross through and there’s peace, maybe, or at least something worth singing about. | 2016-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Run for Cover | October 26, 2016 | 7.1 | 545ee408-b7c4-4e3e-83ae-c51b1237e58a | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
Girl Talk's 2006 LP Night Ripper made him the of-the-moment party starter, and now his first major release as a semi-popular act-- another confluence of shameless thrills and near-overwhelming abundance-- comes off like the ultimate July 4th rooftop soundtrack. | Girl Talk's 2006 LP Night Ripper made him the of-the-moment party starter, and now his first major release as a semi-popular act-- another confluence of shameless thrills and near-overwhelming abundance-- comes off like the ultimate July 4th rooftop soundtrack. | Girl Talk: Feed the Animals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11937-feed-the-animals/ | Feed the Animals | As I was finishing an interview with Gregg Gillis in July 2006, he casually mentioned his desire to see M. Night Shyamalan's just-released fantasy movie Lady in the Water. Given the film's wretched reviews-- a pitiful 24% on Rotten Tomatoes-- and the train-wreck hype surrounding it, I thought he was kidding. He wasn't; Gillis liked some of Shyamalan's other flicks, so he wanted to check this one out. Simple. And it's this omnivorous, pleasure-seeking attitude toward pop culture that defines his work as Girl Talk. (Luckily, his taste in music is superior to his taste in film.)
Unlike mash-up makers in it to figure out the lamest way to combine two song titles, justify their existence with cheap mp3 blog Diggs, or wind up in a Cobrasnake shot with some Olsen twin look-a-like, Gillis just really likes stuffing tons of his favorite FM moments into bursts of Top 40 overload. "I'm a pop music enthusiast," he told me. Hailing from the anti-flash city of Pittsburgh, Gillis has sidestepped the Absolut-sponsored stigma associated with of-the-moment party starters ever since 2006's Night Ripper sent him on a never-ending tour of sweat-stained clubs. While his live set changes with the ebb and flow of the Hot 100, this is Gillis' first major release as a semi-popular act. Unsurprisingly, his new record, Feed the Animals, comes off like the ultimate July 4th rooftop soundtrack. Seems like those stage-crashing dates made the unassuming former biomedical engineer even more eager to indulge his hungry followers. As the recognizable samples zip by at a dizzying clip, it's as if Gillis is standing tall above the fray, screaming: "Are you not entertained?!"
Even with pop's long tail extending with each passing year, there are still new trends that recall the days when hits were hits and major labels ruled the world. While Gillis' pile-on sampling style isn't new (see: Paul's Boutique, DJ Z-Trip, the Avalanches, 2 Many DJ's, et. al), its confluence of shamelessness and abundance is unparalleled. For all its forward thinking, Feed the Animals has an old-school bent. First thing: It's an album. Many of Gillis' contemporaries couldn't be bothered with such an outdated concept, but by choosing the LP route-- instead of, say, a monthly series of hit-blending MP3s-- he's outing his traditionalist tendencies. Gillis is not just trying to just tide his fans over until the next show here, he's trying to give them something to anticipate at the next show.
Which brings us to the Three Stages of Girl Talk: knee-jerk recognition, easy-to-swallow consumption, and, finally, cemented recontextualization. When people go apeshit for his famous Biggie-Elton John pairing, they're taking pleasure in their own memories, the room's collective memory, the indisputable greatness of "Juicy" and "Tiny Dancer", and, possibly above all else, they're cheering for the Girl Talk song that combines all those things so seamlessly. In concert, these mental synapses pop at the same time, and the result is thrilling-- the apotheosis of the Girl Talk experience.
Feed the Animals offers a new round of associative concoctions ready to blow out clubs this summer and beyond. Perhaps in an effort to work his crowd up quicker and more efficiently, Gillis spikes his signature mix of current smashes, hip-hop, 1980s pop, 90s alternative, and classic rock with a slew of wedding-ready staples. There's a reason why every bar mitzvah DJ has Earth, Wind & Fire's "September" in their jam bag and, when it's coupled with Ludacris' pitch-shifted verse from Fergie's "Glamorous", it slays. Similarly, snippets from the Jackson 5, the Spinners, and a decent chunk of "Whoomp! (There It Is)" provide instant, natural highs.
Several of Night Ripper's best moments had Gillis unlocking the vulnerability of roughneck rap verses with relatively somber backing tracks, and Feed the Animals continues with these hard-soft moments. Lil Wayne gets the treatment twice: first when his "Stuntin' Like My Daddy" verse ("where I'm from we see a fuckin' dead body everyday") is put over top the ageless "Nothing Compares 2 U", and then when the hook to "Lollipop" is backed by "Under the Bridge"-- apart from some pitch issues, the latter's perfect fit is uncanny. The more typical juxtapositions are predictably hit (Lil Mama pushing shiny lips over Metallica's "One") and miss (Jay-Z's "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is...)" boasts are miniaturized by Radiohead's "Paranoid Android"), and the classic rock inclusions have a way of derailing the mix's meticulous r&b/dance flow. But that's the beauty of Girl Talk-- if you hit a lackluster patch, it's over before you can say the Band vs. Yung Joc.
Feed the Animals helps to solidify Gillis' role as the supreme 80s-baby pop synthesizer. And while others have attempted to claw up to his lofty position, no one has managed to match his unique mix of diversity, pace, and open-mindedness-- not to mention his exquisite ear for snagging the best 15 seconds of every three-minute track blaring from your clock radio. He's post-modern, post-guilty pleasure, and post-lawsuit (maybe). "The whole basis of the music is that people have these emotional attachments to these songs," he told me. "Being able to manipulate that is a really easy way to connect with people." Easy for him; good for us. | 2008-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Illegal Art | June 27, 2008 | 8 | 546dbe55-ed4b-4417-a120-b7becdebb130 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The Ohio rapper showcases the benefits of refining a long-running aesthetic while also revealing its main limitation: the looming sense that things are getting a bit stale. | The Ohio rapper showcases the benefits of refining a long-running aesthetic while also revealing its main limitation: the looming sense that things are getting a bit stale. | Trippie Redd: A Love Letter to You 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trippie-redd-a-love-letter-to-you-3/ | A Love Letter to You 3 | In the video for “Topanga,” Trippie Redd is dressed as an irreverent pastor, singing about his ability to save his damsel and tote guns. He’s not the kind of vicar to pass around the collection plate; there are pentagrams and animal skulls dispersed throughout. He levitates menacingly, his hair’s an angry shade of crimson, there’s a green serpent here as well. Neat!
Trippie Redd’s brand of emo rap is similarly hackneyed. That doesn’t stop him from making these consummate odes to heartbreak. But while his sad songs sound a touch more authentic and sensible here, the overall doom-and-gloom shtick is starting to wear thin. A Love Letter to You 3 showcases the benefits of refining a long-running aesthetic while also revealing its main limitation: the looming sense that things are getting a bit stale.
Trippie Redd’s caterwauling makes his music endearing when it connects and grating when it misses. Since the release of A Love Letter to You 2, he’s tuned-up his emotional screeches to sound a little more soothing and milky. A Love Letter to You 3 begins with “Topanga” that builds a somber soundtrack for Trippie’s most vulnerable-sounding carols yet. He sings about gunplay with newly polished vocals. Gone are the simplistic choruses and general sleaze weighed down his songwriting; in its place is a multi-part refrain that indicates a degree of familiarity with his faults. It quickly establishes a familiar somber mood that gets further excavated throughout the project as he digs into emo rap’s fascination with brandishing pain’s outcomes. The idea isn’t novel but it’s a little more fleshed out than many of his peers.
Thankfully, he’s not chasing hits, which made Life’s a Trip an uneven slog. A Love Letter to You 3 is a blended affair of melancholy music with a gentle alt-rock atmosphere and plucky guitar strings throughout. “Toxic Waste” blooms smooth and slowly, similar to the slightly more lively “Love Scars 3.” Its consistency, aside from the drowning 808s of “1400/999 Freestyle” which feature an eye-rolling tough guy act from Juice WRLD, lends to its authenticity and flowing nature. Without the potholes, it’s a smoother ride.
But while consistency can be read as a strong point, it also makes these songs naggingly predictable. This is the third installment of his flagship series and, now, the tortured-soul act is wearing thin. “I Tried Loving” borders on pestering whining with a heartless ode about heartbreak. There’s at least four relationship-ending songs up here and they begin to bleed together after a couple of listens. Without the bright, creative spots, the doom and gloom begin to feel manufactured to adhere to an aesthetic that he seems lost without. This is frightening because when there’s nothing zippy left to snap attention to, interest begins to wane. A Love Letter 3 is hopefully a farewell for Trippie’s puppy-eyed passages. This is a rare case where the music can be technically sound, yet be largely dismissible because there’s no growth. Emo rap is a crowded space with more innovative artists than Trippie; to eat again, he’ll need to change up his hunting style. | 2018-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 10K Projects / Caroline | November 16, 2018 | 6.6 | 5473f738-a527-4f47-a4d4-676f94a34da2 | Trey Alston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/trey-alston/ | |
Cursive's Tim Kasher has what is perhaps the worst great voice in indie rock. His voice doesn't gracefully ... | Cursive's Tim Kasher has what is perhaps the worst great voice in indie rock. His voice doesn't gracefully ... | Cursive: Cursive's Domestica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1700-cursives-domestica/ | Cursive's Domestica | Cursive's Tim Kasher has what is perhaps the worst great voice in indie rock. His voice doesn't gracefully arc up to touch glorious high notes or frolic easily through melodic fields; it's grating, laborious, and a bit slurred. But a more earnest, volatile, emotionally charged voice cannot be found. The utter sincerity behind that which he writes, the perfect inflection and expression from the far-from-perfect vocal chords, the brains evident behind the guitar brawn: these things are what make Kasher's voice sound gorgeous.
I've come to the conclusion that the worst thing about Cursive's new record is that it's actually called Cursive's Domestica, which is painfully reminiscent of the maligned Mad Season by Matchbox Twenty. Excepting this small item, Cursive's Domestica is the bands most mature, cohesive work to date. The announcement of a new Cursive album should have come as quite a shock to the band's fans in light of the litany of reports detailing their breakup. If this were so, then the brilliant Storms of Early Summer: Semantics of Song would have been Cursive's A Series of Sneaks: a dazzling, albeit tragically ignored swan song.
Instead, scarcely a year and a half later, we have Cursive's Domestica, an album which continues the profound dialogue left off at the close of The Storms of Early Summer, but steers the band in an entirely new direction: concept album territory. No, don't hit the Back button! Cursive actually pull it off in style, faithfully cataloging their interpretation of the politics of love and the unraveling of a relationship.
Kasher, recent divorcee, claims that Domestica is not at all autobiographical. It's times like this that I wish that I knew how to scoff at something in multiple languages. Let's examine the evidence at our disposal: the album sleeve is brimming with pictures of a couple engaging in the throes of domestic life, each one depicting the woman conducting herself with complete sincerity as the male gazes despondently into the distance. The lyrics are fiery and bitter, or utterly jaded, making a mockery of the words we say and the lies we fabricate in relationships; things that one must experience firsthand in order to write about them so accurately. Let's never speak of this non-autobiographical tomfoolery again.
The Cursive sound has evolved alongside the sentiments of its frontman. Cursive have retained their razor edge, creating pulsing, rapidly evolving guitar-based music, yet they're now fueled and guided by the meaning behind the music. The cohesion of lyrics to musical intensity and songwriting is at its peak on Cursive's Domestica, as the expressiveness of the music is as volatile as any relationship, swooping down from furious to somber in a fraction of a second. The addition of new guitarist Ted Stevens has changed the candor of the rhythm section, making it more dissonant and varied in its attack. Crunching guitars and throbbing bass dominate the record, arranged shrewdly beneath Kasher's anguished screams and urgent whispers.
Cursive's Domestica is certainly one of the finest hard indie rock releases of the year thus far and has established an impressive staying capacity in my CD rotation. Kasher's intelligent, thought-provoking lyrics resonate perfectly inside the head of anyone who's ever seen love go sour. "The Martyr" is a standout anthem to those jilted with the finer sex and their perceived emotional volatility, with the ingenious refrain: "Sweet baby don't cry/ Your tears are only alibis." Songs like "A Red So Deep" rock hard while keeping emotions firmly attached to sleeve, asking bitterly, "Are you satisfied tonight?" At only nine tracks, Cursive's Domestica suffers from brevity, but not much more. If you're happily linked with a member of the opposite sex, stay away from this record. Otherwise, the world needs Cursive. | 2000-06-20T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2000-06-20T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | June 20, 2000 | 8 | 5474acf5-1978-46e2-bf18-a12840a59f52 | Pitchfork | null |
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Issued for the first time are the rhapsodic, intimate, melancholy tunes of Lynn Castle, the first lady barber of L.A. who recorded these demos with Lee Hazlewood and Jack Nitzsche in the late 1960s. | Issued for the first time are the rhapsodic, intimate, melancholy tunes of Lynn Castle, the first lady barber of L.A. who recorded these demos with Lee Hazlewood and Jack Nitzsche in the late 1960s. | Lynn Castle: Rose Colored Corner | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lynn-castle-rose-colored-corner/ | Rose Colored Corner | In 1967, Lynn Castle’s image was plastered on a full-page billboard ad, heralding the release of her very first single. A full-length album, though, would not come for another fifty years. Back then in Los Angeles, Castle was known as the Lady Barber, a term that now reads a little archaic, perhaps a little campy, but at the time, it was radical. Women didn’t work in barber shops, but Castle, who also apparently styled her own magnificent, towering mane, had grown bored of setting hair in rollers. She ditched the drudgery of beauty salons for a joint on the Sunset Strip called the Rogue Barber Shop, where she specialized in cutting the long locks that dusted the shoulders of male musicians and actors of the day: The Byrds, Del Shannon, Sonny Bono, Stephen Stills, Neil Young. She wrote songs for some of them too. Hair was her day job, paying the bills for two young kids at home, but music was her dream.
For a minute it seemed as though she might be able to turn it into a career: There was the advance buzz for “The Lady Barber” (with “Rose-Colored Corner” as the B side), appearances on “What’s My Line” with Frank Sinatra and in the Sonny and Cher film Good Times, a profile in the Washington Post. But for whatever reason, Castle’s bewitching, moody songs stayed mostly unreleased for decades, until Light in the Attic’s repeat diggings into the seemingly bottomless mine of Lee Hazlewood recordings recently turned up the psychedelic cowboy’s collaborations with the lady barber. Rose Colored Corner, sourced mostly from her demo tapes, is a time capsule of a quiet, obscure side of 1960s L.A. You can picture Castle, perhaps sitting on a barstool, spotlit on a dim stage at the Troubadour, maybe, strumming her rhapsodic, melancholic tunes.
Her songs alluded to her remarkable life, which is spelled a bit more out in the liner notes, written by Hunter Lea, who co-produced LITA’s Lee Hazlewood releases. Castle spent her childhood shuttling from Catholic school to living with her father and his new family. Feeling unloved but undeterred, she sought refuge in music and boys and running away from home. While still in high school, she met a teenaged Phil Spector, who snuck into her window and played songs by his band the Teddy Bears; he took her cruising around the Valley in his blue Corvette. By 22, she was a mom and a hairdresser, and writing songs in her closet on a rosewood Martin guitar that Hazlewood gave her. Somewhere along the way, they’d become friends; in the 1950s they’d make drives to Phoenix together where they heard a young Waylon Jennings play with his band the Waylors. Hazlewood introduced Castle to legendary producer Jack Nitzsche, but it was Hazlewood who told her, enthusiastically, that her songs were quite good.
He was right. There is a smoky ache in Castle’s voice—tough and deep, wise and wistful, somewhere in between Nico and early ’70s Cher—that belies these searching ballads. Sometime after Castle’s first acid trip, she wrote a thinly veiled song about LSD for her flip-haired clients the Monkees (“Teeny Tiny Gnome” would eventually appear on the band’s rarities comp Missing Links in the ’80s). In her own songs, nature is a magical, otherworldly presence: “Diamond sundrops fall/Kaleidoscoping patterns on the floor of quiet Forest,” she sings on “Forest,” the standout opener. In Castle’s sweetly acid-tinged imagination, quite likely, there are indeed wizards in them woods.
Several of the songs that follow hover in a similar register and cadence, accompanied by Castle’s soft strumming. There’s a rawness about them, unvarnished, honest, and occasionally prone to downright laments (“What in the World Would I Do”) and the fragile confessions (“Lonesome Look-Out,” “The Stranger”). The final two songs offer evidence of what might have been if Castle’s work had gotten a full production treatment back then. Both “The Lady Barber” and the album’s second version of the title track of Rose Colored Corner were recorded one midnight by Hazlewood in the silo tank in Phoenix where he also recorded with Duane Eddy, yielding the same chorusy reverb of the Eddy sessions, with LHI Records artist Last Friday’s Fire adding fuzz guitar and organ drone. “The Lady Barber” has the kind of buoyant, rollicking tempo that chugs along in Hazlewood’s Trouble Is a Lonesome Town and the fuzz guitars; this rendition of “Rose Colored Corner,” also backed by a full band, feels anthemic.
If Castle had done more elaborate sessions with Hazlewood or Nitzsche and been granted the confidence and career boost of an album release back then—would she have won the fame of Hazlewood star Nancy Sinatra, or gone on to make records that soared a little higher, got a little weirder? Instead, Castle slipped back into introverted obscurity, contributing to B-movie soundtracks under the alias Madelynn Von Ritz, raising her kids, and continuing to record her music largely for herself. Now a grandmother in Los Angeles, she recently taught herself ProTools. But these songs, delivered in Castle’s premature world weariness, aren’t seeking instant gratification—their sorrow and loneliness finds solace in escapism and fantasy. Castle may have written out of sadness, but she’s made peace with it. When she sings “I’m happy in my rose-colored corner,” you believe her. | 2017-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Folk/Country | Light in the Attic | June 16, 2017 | 7.5 | 5477debc-c293-4acb-acc2-75399c617a7a | Rebecca Bengal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca-bengal/ | null |
Active since the 1990s, the Japanese producer is enjoying a rising profile in the West. His dreamy new album celebrates the synergy between humans and machines. | Active since the 1990s, the Japanese producer is enjoying a rising profile in the West. His dreamy new album celebrates the synergy between humans and machines. | Takecha: Deep Soundscapes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/takecha-deep-soundscapes/ | Deep Soundscapes | The Japanese house producer Takeshi Fukushima’s understated beats are as unassuming as the producer himself. During the week, Fukushima works in a factory near Shiga, Japan, his lifelong hometown. But on weekends he powers up his studio, sculpting house beats that bear traces of the music he grew up with: Kraftwerk, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono. But Fukushima’s tunes on his new album Deep Soundscapes, released under his Takecha alias, are far more stripped down than the electro pop of his youth, favoring a glitchy, loop-driven style of house music that draws from Mark Fell’s minimal grooves as SND, Jan Jelinek’s scratchy IDM, and Ron Trent’s warm deep house.
Fukushima has been active since the 1990s, though his tunes have mostly flown under the radar outside of Japan. But that started to change at the end of 2015 when his “Deep Loop” was re-released on the ハウス Once Upon A Time In Japan… compilation. Then, in 2017, Fukushima reissued several of his ’90s productions, original copies of which had become virtually impossible to find. Fukushima’s profile continued to rise in the wake of other Japanese producers who had been re-discovered in the West, like Soichi Terada and So Inagawa.
Unlike Terada’s jovial, party-starting house music, Takecha’s mellow grooves won’t catapult the producer onto the global festival circuit, but his deep, head-nodding productions are no less captivating. Deep Soundscapes is filled with gentle house and glitchy ambient tracks that explore a deep synergy between humans and machines. Fukushima’s interest in this connection runs through his whole catalog. The record label he’s run since 1995, GWM (also one of his production aliases), is an anagram for “Groove With Machine,” and across his productions, Takecha seems to be searching for the soul inside his synthesizers and samplers, bringing their organic potential to the surface. Take “Factory 141,” where he re-pitches and rearranges the clanking sounds of a factory into a mechanical lullaby. The grinding samples are dark and heavy, but a gentle, elegiac synth melody offsets those stark sounds, perhaps reflecting the relief and exhaustion Fukushima feels when he clocks out of his factory job at the end of the day.
Even the more upbeat tracks on Deep Soundscapes, like “Gradual Atmosphere” and “Warm Rondo,” are submerged in a gentle mist, their burrowing bass lines keeping the tracks from drifting too far above ground. When Takecha slows the tempo down, on “Rhodes Detox,” “Calm Imagination,” and “Low Sentiment,” he harks back to the golden-era IDM of Boards of Canada. On each of his tracks, mellow synth chords hang in the air like floating dandelion tufts, enveloping his clicking, mechanical beats with a weightless air.
Deep Soundscapes’ warmth is evidenced in the music’s gently weathered patina: Each track feels layered with love and attention, pored over and reduced for hours before reaching its final form. Takecha’s supremely relaxed vibe is reflected in his track titles, which are full of words like “Calm,” “Warm,” “Tender,” and “Innocence.” It makes for a fitting soundtrack for daydreaming and cloud watching, late nights and early mornings. Although Fukushima has kept a low profile in the press, his music doesn’t feel steeped in mystery or ego—there’s a directness to his approach that resonates as heartfelt and genuine. In Deep Soundscapes’ thoughtful layering, you don’t get the sense that Takecha is trying to one-up anybody—he’s just being himself. | 2018-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Love Potion | March 24, 2018 | 7.2 | 54794487-0c56-409b-8952-d7218c128930 | Jesse Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-weiss/ | |
El Conejo Malo’s fifth solo LP is a rap homecoming. It doesn’t possess the magic or sophistication of his best work, but it’s just as horny and cavalier. | El Conejo Malo’s fifth solo LP is a rap homecoming. It doesn’t possess the magic or sophistication of his best work, but it’s just as horny and cavalier. | Bad Bunny: nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bad-bunny-nadie-sabe-lo-que-va-a-pasar-manana/ | nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana | Once upon a time, Bad Bunny was the king of a movement called Latin trap. Seven years ago, before the Rolling Stone covers and the Gucci ads with Kendall Jenner, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio was an audacious newcomer with labyrinthine graphics on his scalp and a closet full of neon short-shorts. When his 2022 album Un Verano Sin Ti—a pop masterwork immersed in Caribbean humidity and dreamy glitz—arrived, it catapulted him into the public eye like never before. If you weren’t already following Benito’s journey, UVST’s gushing sentimentality and commercial polish made it seem like the Puerto Rican artist had always been the kind of pop star who sells out stadiums. But acolytes know that Benito has long been an elite rapper—even if he’s sometimes sidelined that skill on his jaunt to the top.
Nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana, Bad Bunny’s fifth solo studio LP, functions like a rap homecoming. The album is bloated but thematically focused, centered on some of Benito’s favorite topics: fucking, counting racks, his love of Puerto Rico. As he embraces the insouciant recklessness and unabashed horniness that enamored the globe, some might rejoice that El Conejo Malo has returned to his roots. Though he’s preternaturally funny and frequently debonair, only a portion of these songs approach the vim and vigor of his generation-defining anthems.
Nadie sabe comes to life when Benito is intentionally provocative or artfully humorous. His smutty wisecracks produce laugh-out-loud gems: On the salacious “Baticano,” he invokes Teletubby characters in a rhyme about putting his pinky in a woman’s ass and making love to her where she “pees” and “poops.” On “Fina,” he brags about his dick being bald and big-headed, like the four-year-old cartoon character Caillou. “Thunder y Lightning” is a gritty drill howl, with Benito and guest Eladio Carrión going bar for bar as they stunt through deep-cut Puerto Rican sports references. When the song ends, Benito takes a jab at former creative partner J Balvin for being too infatuated with success, noting that he’s “friends with everybody.”
The antics are entertaining, and embody the cavalier goofiness that has set Bad Bunny apart in an industry full of high-gloss acts with little to say. But many songs lack the sophistication and structural complexity of his trap epics. Opener “Nadie Sabe” is a Drake-adjacent lament on celebrity insecurity, while “Hibiki,” “Gracias Por Nada,” and “Baby Nueva” are marred by unimaginative flexing and empty kiss-offs. Benito usually does everything with a peerless sense of panache and individuality—and a thoughtful eye for the issues affecting his homeland—so it feels uncharacteristic for him to be preoccupied with such prosaic concerns. Even Benito himself seems to recognize this: On the highlight “Los Pits,” which recalls Jay-Z’s realization in “Moment of Clarity,” he claims that he could be “rapping about more profound issues, but the checks arrive and confuse me.”
There are sublime exceptions. “Monaco” and “Vou 787” construct a fantasia of luxury—a life filled with Cuban cigars, million-dollar Bugattis, and diamond-encrusted glassware. Sumptuous samples augment the aura of opulence: MAG and La Paciencia loop the romantic strings of Charles Aznavour’s “Hier Encore” on “Monaco,” while “Vou 787” lifts the silken synth line that opens Madonna’s “Vogue.” The production is consistently impressive, as on “Teléfono Nuevo,” which begins with the type of moonstruck, synth-driven glimmer that reflects Benito’s gift for amplifying wistful emotion into small moments of triumph. When a disconnect tone cuts off the beat, it’s like your brain just dropped the call. Halfway through the first verse of the macabre standout “Vuelve Candy B,” he hushes his voice, delivering the rest of his bars in a susurrous, theatrical flurry. It’s an exciting flow switch that reprises Benito’s indelible magnetism.
At 22 tracks and 81 minutes, nadie sabe is the type of overlong streaming-era album that could use a meticulous edit to help its treasures sparkle. Too frequently, it feels like a regression from the star-making highs of Bad Bunny’s rap past. Consider 2016’s “Tu No Vive Así,” where Benito nimbly folded in obscure references to Taíno chieftains and catechism courses. Or return to 2020’s “Booker T,” in which he growled through his teeth, flipped a children’s folk song into a boast, and paused dramatically to sip water and catch his breath. Both of these songs avoided inane stunting, instead cultivating Bad Bunny’s mythos through inventive and unexpected flourishes. And while the man has built a reputation for making party and political anthems alike, it’s not that nadie sabe would be better if it were more explicitly radical; those kinds of expectations place unrealistic demands on pop stars and usually lead to disappointment. Bad Bunny can rap about sex and money all he wants, but he’s capable of doing so with much more intricacy and magic. To use Benito’s own words, you can’t just say you’re the best. You also have to prove it. | 2023-10-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Rimas | October 17, 2023 | 7.4 | 54845d73-be9b-41ac-9e67-88a7376a44db | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
While retaining the eerie, claustrophobic atmosphere of its predecessor, the second LP from Portishead mastermind Geoff Barrow's krautrock project boasts a brisker, more purposeful sequence. | While retaining the eerie, claustrophobic atmosphere of its predecessor, the second LP from Portishead mastermind Geoff Barrow's krautrock project boasts a brisker, more purposeful sequence. | Beak>: >> | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16697-recordreview/ | >> | Geoff Barrow doesn't do anything half-assed. His primary band, Portishead, are notorious for taking an average of seven years between albums to acheive that perfect shade of noir. But each of the items in Barrow's bursting dossier of extracurricular assignments bears his meticulous touch. When he feels like making a hip-hop record, he assembles one with 41 tracks and 30-plus guest MCs. When he wants to sign a rock band to his Invada imprint, he goes for one built from a Paul’s Boutique-level of sample-based bricolage. When he scores a production gig for an NME-endorsed group of garage-punk pin-ups, he refashions them as widescreen-visioned psychedelic goths. And when he's in the mood to hear some Krautrock, rather than just dust off his well-worn copy of Tago Mago, he makes a BEAK> record.
Krautrock, of course, has become as much of a default mode for experimental indie bands as the blues was for a previous generation of classic-rockers. And in BEAK>'s case, the sonic resemblances to their 70s forbears can be, well, unCanny: even more so than the band's self-titled 2009 debut, >> sounds like it was recorded inside of Jaki Liebezeit's kick drum, all hypno-bass throb, heavy percussive grooves, and buzzing analog synths. Krautrock is synonymous with a certain rhythmic precision and propulsion, but BEAK> don't just lock into a motorik beat and activate the cruise control. Rather, they see the music as part of a broader continuum, digging up its roots in the frazzled psychedelia of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, funk, and musique concrete, while emphasizing its influence on everything from electro and post-punk to Italian horror-movie soundtracks and stoner-metal.
As the lone keystroke difference between the first and second album titles suggest, this is a band that progresses in increments. BEAK>> retains the same eerie, claustrophobic atmosphere as its predecessor-- after all, its opening track is a sludgy, slow-motion swirl of police-siren effects called "The Gaol"-- and the ominously indecipherable vocals sound like they were recorded by the mouth-less dummies seen in their press shots. But the new album also boasts a brisker pace-- spurred by the excitable synth-rock thrust of "Yatton" and "Elevator", and the mushroom-heady funk of "Spinning Top"-- tauter arrangements, and a more purposeful sequence: All roads lead to side two's seven-minute colossus "Wulfstan II", an Earth-quaking jolt of brown-acid rock whose unrelenting, fuzz-bomb stomp is periodically interrupted by well-timed, organ-guided breakdowns, only to reemerge more nasty and unforgiving than before. (Though its Richter-scale reading is almost matched by the slow-creeping closer "Kidney", which begins as a Young Marble Giants murmur before erupting into a Slintian roar.) Barrow recently quipped to Rolling Stone that it could be another "fucking 10 years" before we see a new Portishead record; whether he was joking or not, the wait will feel a little less interminable so long as this band continues to put their best > forward. | 2012-06-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-06-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Invada | June 5, 2012 | 7.3 | 548ddc28-a1d6-4ab2-b7aa-619039f05e4f | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On softCORE, the New Jersey native mashes pop punk grit and airy R&B. It’s a commendable undertaking, but the execution is rough. | On softCORE, the New Jersey native mashes pop punk grit and airy R&B. It’s a commendable undertaking, but the execution is rough. | Fousheé: softCORE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foushee-softcore/ | softCORE | Fousheé’s voice sounds like the sentient form of nails scratching against a chalkboard, but it’s so sharp, so memorable, that you absolutely want to hear it again. That coveted commodity has made her a go-to featured guest; on a 2021 collab with Lil Wayne, she makes sorrow sound enticing. On Ravyn Lenae’s vibrant HYPNOS, she makes a rough breakup feel celestial. And on Steve Lacy’s “Sunshine,” she encapsulates the bliss of love’s unexpected turns. But the textures that make the singer’s vivid songwriting and piercing falsetto so commanding are difficult to decipher on softCORE, her official debut album. Instead, the record lands as a faulty attempt at meshing punk grit with her folk-tinged R&B.
On the New Jersey native’s 2021 project time machine, a record anchored by stunning vocal delivery and guitar-laced soul, the singer embraced her relationship insecurities. This time around, she relies on punk and R&B to sift through her fears. But the album oscillates too frantically between the two genres, making softCORE feel like an ill-conceived experiment.
Across 12 tracks, Fousheé confronts a catharsis filled with unyielding rage, sass, lust, and anguish. softCORE’s punk tracks are bold and mesmerizing, almost imposing, and it often makes the album’s R&B songs feel obsolete. “simmer down,” the behemoth opener, is an angsty track backed by thrashing basslines and lush guitar chords. Fousheé reveals just how searing she can be when someone dares to threaten her: “And you haven’t seen crazy till you pissed off a Jamaican,” she warns in the first verse. On “bored” and “die,” Fousheé proves that she can transform her soft wails into the kind of caustic dexterity needed to carry a punk song. And when the soft guitar-picking on “i’m fine” mutates into flashes of screamo, Fousheé shows she can masterfully camouflage her inner turmoil with a false sense of tranquility.
softCORE’s pure R&B tracks pale in comparison to its grand punk displays. “unexplainable” is a dull track about a toxic romance that lacks the intensity that permeates the first part of the album. Similarly, on the blissful “smile,” Fousheé treads into familiar territory with airy vocal patterns that don’t sufficiently fortify the singer’s adventure into new styles. The breadth of softCORE’s punk tracks could have positioned the singer-songwriter as a luminous addition to the current pop-punk revival, joining peers like WILLOW and Machine Gun Kelly. But infusing anticlimactic R&B songs that dilute the album’s punk-inspired momentum makes Fousheé’s arrival into that arena seem less convincing.
Still, the raw, descriptive storytelling across softCORE invigorates the album in its placid moments. Take the Lil Uzi Vert-assisted track “spend the money,” in which Fousheé drops cutting barbs about how she’s with a partner only for what they can financially provide. And on “supernova,” she makes the euphoria of lust sound like a top tourist destination: “Supernova high like glitter in the sky/I’m faded out my mind/Let’s make a memory.”
Fousheé’s voice is liberating and her songwriting bleeds with emotion. Her pursuits on softCORE prove that it’s possible for pop-punk and R&B to exist in the same space, which adds a fresh take on the nostalgia train steering the former’s resurgence. While the endeavor is admirable and audacious, its execution isn’t as seamless as the fluidity of Fousheé’s own voice. | 2022-11-21T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-21T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | November 21, 2022 | 6.8 | 548e90e6-9e5b-4f7c-aa38-590146a52aa6 | DeAsia Paige | https://pitchfork.com/staff/deasia-paige/ | |
Though it's a solid effort, Young Jeezy's long-delayed fourth LP feels both airless and over-inflated, the sound of an artist trying to revisit something gone. | Though it's a solid effort, Young Jeezy's long-delayed fourth LP feels both airless and over-inflated, the sound of an artist trying to revisit something gone. | Jeezy: Thug Motivation 103: Hustlerz Ambition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16140-thug-motivation-103-hustlerz-ambition/ | Thug Motivation 103: Hustlerz Ambition | Once upon a time, Young Jeezy was invincible, a superhero. He grew famous peddling an overblown, over-simplified cartoon of machismo and violence, pumped full of dubious sociopolitical implications and adrenaline. His first three albums were some of the last decade's finest action flicks. The widescreen production, from Shawty Redd, DJ Toomp, and others, furnished the exploding tanks while Jeezy supplied the boiled-down, bumper-sticker dialogue: "I remember nights/ I didn't remember nights." "Who, me?/ I emerge from the crack smoke." He was Stallone in Cobra; he was Schwarzenegger in Commando.
But every decade has its own action heroes. Nowadays, Jeezy is just another down-on-his luck gangsta rapper being jerked around by his record company. Rick Ross is the overfed rap kingpin of the moment; the simmering feud between them has nothing to do with street credentials and everything to do with the fact that in a rap moment mired in varsity-lettered, middle-class nice guys, there's room for only one Rambo. Thug Motivation 103: Hustlerz Ambition, which has finally wheezed its way across the finish line, is a telling moment: It's a solid effort, but it's also the first time that supply for the Snowman's product has begun to outstrip demand.
Nothing much is visibly wrong with Thug Motivation 103. In fact, a lot of it is pretty great: "Trapped" opens with a verse from boho neo-soul queen Jill Scott that induces misplaced nostalgia shivers for classic Lauryn Hill. Jeezy sells the hoary details of the song's poverty lament-- no cable in the house, old milk in the empty fridge-- with gut-twisting force. On "Way Too Gone", rising Atlanta producer Mike WiLL Made It (Meek Millz's "Tupac Back", Gucci Mane's "East Atlanta 6") provides a head-spinning cross-breed of trap-rap and cloud rap. The Fabolous and Jadakiss-assisted "OJ" provides the extravagant ignorance. All of it is satisfyingly huge- and evil-sounding.
And yet Thug Motivation somehow feels both airless and over-inflated, the sound of an artist trying to revisit something gone. In the long gap between this record and 2008's The Recession, Jeezy has done almost nothing to tweak his formula-- a brief guest appearance by of-the-moment ATL star Future aside, there's not much here to suggest Jeezy has been keeping tabs on Southern rap's furiously molting trends, which means even the exciting moments have a certain "I am big; it's the pictures that got small" feel.
You can hear the lack of organic excitement most clearly on the album's curiously flat Huge High-Profile Hard-Sell collaboration: "I Do", featuring Jay-Z and André 3000. Jay-Z hasn't appeared on a Jeezy record since the remix to "Go Crazy", and André 3000 guest verses pop up about as frequently as the Northern Lights; the result, however, is shockingly unexciting for the pooled talents involved. For one, the song openly mimics the formula of "International Player's Anthem"-- ecstatic soul loop, rapturous André verse about marital love-- and baldly copying one of the best rap songs of the last decade is just a bad idea. When it leaked, it was greeted mostly with shrugs and yawns and disappeared into the same, sealed-off rap-buzz purgatory that has settled around other former gangsta-rap heavyweights like 50 Cent. Despite all indicators, and without a chart or street single, Thug Motivation 103 sold respectably, and probably beat his label's projections: 233,000, just behind Michael Buble's Christmas album and Adele. The Snowman will live to wheeze another day. But his aura of invincibility has been punctured. | 2012-01-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-01-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam / Corporate Thugz | January 3, 2012 | 6.7 | 548f796a-664d-4c9c-a466-ef01acc4f603 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Mountain Moves is one of Deerhoof’s widest-ranging and most melodic sets, with hints of chamber music, hip-hop, and avant-garde jazz, plus more legible lyrics than usual. It’s a purposeful mosaic. | Mountain Moves is one of Deerhoof’s widest-ranging and most melodic sets, with hints of chamber music, hip-hop, and avant-garde jazz, plus more legible lyrics than usual. It’s a purposeful mosaic. | Deerhoof: Mountain Moves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deerhoof-mountain-moves/ | Mountain Moves | Deerhoof has enjoyed one of the most vibrant careers of any ensemble with roots in the world of 1990s indie rock. One of the group’s rewards for this achievement has been the fact that it can be easy to take its consistent creativity for granted. Around the time a band makes a dozen quite-good albums, parsing the development from recording-to-recording tends to become the duty of the hardcore coterie. That’s natural. Though there is always a chance that a band will fashion some late-career statement that marks a new stage of development—a high every bit as notable as that of the “early breakthrough.”
Mountain Moves is one of Deerhoof’s widest-ranging albums. It’s also one of the band’s most melodic sets. In 15 songs that speed by in 40 minutes, there are hints of chamber music, hip-hop, and avant-garde jazz—as well as this band’s trademark combination of brightly sweet vocal lines and churning instrumental parts, joyfully descended from earlier punk styles. The album boasts three cover tunes, and over half a dozen guest stars. Yet it’s not a crazy quilt. It’s a mosaic with a purpose, right down to lyrics that seem more pointed and legible than is typical for a group with a surrealistic bent.
On the mid-tempo opener “Slow Motion Detonation,” singer-bassist-composer Satomi Matsuzaki calls on the listener to “celebrate the future that you could have saved.” This strange idea takes on a new emotional profile when Matsuzaki encourages her audience to “Get up, get up/We’re on fire.” The arrangement behind the singer changes, too—the band’s performance sounding less somber, if still far short of celebratory. The song’s final question may sound like a non-sequitur: “And why would I want to watch it on TV?” Though as the album progresses, the band’s purpose in distinguishing between valuable action and the unproductive mediascape becomes clearer.
“I Will Spite Survive” introduces itself with a sunnier guitar riff, indebted to new wave. But the lyrics are still addressing a lost opportunity: “You could outlive your executioners, but you’re on TV.” Even when the idea of effective opposition becomes a more organized presence on the album, during the dance-punk strains of “Come Down Here & Say That,” Deerhoof makes clear that the activity is coming too late, and only in response to something dangerous: “We will take over the heavy burden …/We dance merrily, for we are sad.”
The band’s approach to writing and recording Mountain Moves was directly inspired by the outcome of the 2016 election. Notes accompanying the album reference the recent “women’s march,” timed for the presidential inauguration, as well as “pro-science rallies” and the “maniacal, mainstream monoculture hell-bent on driving humankind into extinction.” This punk-inspired reaction to a right-wing electoral success might seem rote: an act of opposition, conceived in collaborative fashion, with early proceeds going to a liberal charity. And Mountain Moves does make all these gestures. Though it is not at the level of concept that the album makes its real stand. That all happens in the execution.
After a faux-operatic take on Violeta Parra’s “Gracias a la Vida,” Deerhoof throttles into a dreamy, carefree theme, “Begin Countdown”—a track that culminates in the album’s heaviest riff. From there, the angst of the lyrics tends to sound more cathartic. “Palace of the Governors” has just a single lyric: “You won’t live in this house forever.” Despite being addressed to an occupier of some elected office, it reminds us that as long as elections are held fairly, no political outcome is permanent.
The dour nature of the album’s first few tracks is gradually overwhelmed by the variety of what follows. Singer-songwriter Xenia Rubinos possesses one of the most awe-inspiring voices in all of the genres she tackles—a suite of forms that includes rock, jazz, as well as R&B. Her vocals bring a fresh form of release during the song “Singalong Junk” (an original composition, not the McCartney tune).
Next up is the sound of saxophonist Matana Roberts, who guests on the title track. In the space of the same breath, her tone can jump from a traditionally soulful cast to one that is experimentally intense—which makes her a perfect fit for the jump-cut sound aesthetic favored by Deerhoof drummer-vocalist-composer Greg Saunier. Covers of the Staple Singers’ “Freedom Highway” and Bob Marley’s “Small Axe” come during the album’s last stretch, too, ratifying the album’s steadily improving outlook.
During 2016, Deerhoof split its energies between releases. They put out an entertaining, back-to-basics stomper and a bold collaboration with a contemporary classical outfit in the same season. With Mountain Moves, the group has pooled these interests without diluting them. This doesn’t seem like a casual or random choice. Given the album’s way of sequencing its many voices and moods, Deerhoof suggests that the real work of joyful opposition can begin only after members of a coalition have spent time contemplating a worsening national climate (and perhaps taken some responsibility for this turn). Once that’s occurred, Mountain Moves indicates that something better—something made by diverse but like-minded collaborators—might be able to come next. | 2017-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Joyful Noise | September 8, 2017 | 7.7 | 54911172-3f3b-46d4-82bb-137ea1551001 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The Australian musician chooses herself over the bullshit on a cheeky, colorful album that flexes greater musical confidence. | The Australian musician chooses herself over the bullshit on a cheeky, colorful album that flexes greater musical confidence. | Tkay Maidza: Sweet Justice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tkay-maidza-sweet-justice/ | Sweet Justice | Tkay Maidza’s three-part Last Year Was Weird EP series was a hairpin turn for an artist looking for a new direction. Moving on from stadium-ready EDM-pop-rap, the Australian musician flaunted a more eclectic range while giving herself space to own the mess of being in the spotlight. She dove into lush digital funk, explosive SOPHIE-style bangers, and cheeky hip-hop with the unrestrained zeal of a kid in a ball pit while also sharpening her confidence. One second she’d be slithering through chest-thumping industrial hip-hop; the next, she’d be cooing over jaunty guitars and whistles.
Sweet Justice, Maidza’s sophomore album and her first full-length in seven years, expands on that growing musical confidence, the whiplash between funk, dance, and industrial styles more intense than ever. With fiery lyrics and sharper bravado, it’s an album largely about karma: “Eat your heart out on a silver plate/They been fishy so I’m eating steak/On the hook I catch ‘em with the bait/Get up out my face is si vous plait,” she boasts on “WUACV,” named after the meme used when someone’s feeling particularly chaotic. She’s flippant toward her detractors, thoughtful as she navigates life and love. Sweet and sing-songy on highlight “Out of Luck,” she asserts her self-worth against people who demand her time but couldn’t give two shits about her. Generally, Maidza’s vision of justice isn’t based in direct retribution—she knows that choosing herself over the bullshit is the best revenge. “I should buy my bag a bag,” she says, an elite and hilarious flex.
This time producer Dan Farber, who had a heavy hand in the sound of the Weird EPs, cedes space to bigger names, who bring grandeur to her songs. Take the Flume-assisted “Silent Assassin,” which turns sirens, 808s, and video game sound effects into a laser tag field for Maidza to charge at haters. Or the Kaytranada-produced “Our Way,” a smooth dance funk number where Maidza demands a lover to step their game: “Never needed all them roses/I just wanna know I’m chosen.” Like her idols Missy Elliott and Santigold, she can bend her airy voice to any beat, and that’s half the fun.
With Sweet Justice, Maidza is walking the path of artists like Tinashe, who had an easier time finding themselves the further away from the mainstream machine they got. And despite a few stumbles—”WASP” and closing track “Walking On Air” are the album’s most generic offerings—her frenetic fire-and-ice routine is impressive. She’s grown up without losing her freshness, refining the skill and intensity that got her here in the first place. This is the swagger and range that’s appealed her to artists from Billie Eilish to Kari Faux: Maidza makes the act of taking what’s yours sound like a multicolored daydream. | 2023-11-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-11-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD | November 3, 2023 | 7.6 | 549521ce-de04-45f1-89e4-553be981a4f5 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Smoky and ominous, Australian singer/songwriter Carla dal Forno's You Know What It's Like simmers, both musically and thematically, while she inhabits the gloom of her arrangements like a ghost. | Smoky and ominous, Australian singer/songwriter Carla dal Forno's You Know What It's Like simmers, both musically and thematically, while she inhabits the gloom of her arrangements like a ghost. | Carla dal Forno: You Know What It’s Like | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22543-you-know-what-its-like/ | You Know What It’s Like | Technically speaking, Australian musician Carla dal Forno is a singer-songwriter, but her solo debut album shows her mindset is closer to that of a lighting director or set designer. Where even experimental singer-songwriters privilege vocals and chord progressions, dal Forno emphasizes the marginal details, to the extent that what we might think of as the “song” at the core of each track either dissolves outright or lingers in the background as a set of out-of-focus shapes.
Dal Forno’s approach falls closer in spirit to ambient music. Only one song on You Know What It’s Like emphasizes her voice to the point where you’d consider it the “lead” vocal, and she doesn’t even sing on half the tracks. She obviously takes after Grouper in the way she occupies the sumptuous gloom of her songs like a ghost, but her grandiosity and shamanic presence suggest a subdued modern answer to an outsider-art icon like Moondog.
Intro track “Italian Cinema” starts things off on an extravagantly strange note, with layers of sounds resembling the cyclic, serrated rotation of helicopter blades. At times, dal Forno uses found sounds—water pouring from a teapot to introduce “The Same Reply,” a crack of distant lightning at the beginning of “Fast Moving Cars”—to provide hints of setting. But she never lets the sounds eclipse the music's intensive focus on mood. Smoky and ominous, You Know What It’s Like simmers, both musically and thematically, with powerful undercurrents that dal Forno never quite spells out.
On “Fast Moving Cars,” the album’s first vocal tune, dal Forno navigates that thorny zone of longing where she’s prodding the object of her affections not to be so passive. “It’s safe to assume that I like you best, so don’t be so frightened,” she sings. Her unassuming place in the mix actually serves the resolve in her voice—once you pick up on it, the album’s gravity becomes hard to deny. Even when dal Forno tips her hat to Nico on “What You Gonna Do Now?,” she still manages to stake out her own territory. Much like other singer-songwriters who march unequivocally to their own drummer, Carla dal Forno is willing to provoke listeners on a number of levels without spoon-feeding them. With You Know What It’s Like, she manages to do so on her own terms, in a way that feels both distant and inviting and rewards the listener’s willingness to sit with the ambiguity in between. | 2016-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Blackest Ever Black | November 4, 2016 | 7.4 | 54970cd1-2854-4246-8686-a0f1c6bd8898 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Looks like Beyond was not a fluke: The latest from the reunited original line-up is jammed with well-crafted songs that never feel overly polished. | Looks like Beyond was not a fluke: The latest from the reunited original line-up is jammed with well-crafted songs that never feel overly polished. | Dinosaur Jr.: Farm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13109-farm/ | Farm | Beyond, the first album to feature the original Dinosaur Jr. lineup since their 1980s heyday, was so surprisingly good it was tempting to call it a fluke. Tempting, but wrong—two years after its release, it still sounds great, on par with the early, hallowed triumvirate of Dinosaur, You’re Living All Over Me, and Bug. For any cynics still chalking Beyond up to luck, Farm should blast the scales from your jaded eyes. Energetic, confident, and catchy, it's even more compelling than Beyond.
It certainly boasts more stick-in-your-head tunes than Beyond, or virtually any other Dinosaur Jr. album. Who knows why J Mascis writes better songs when Lou Barlow and Murph are around—maybe there’s something to the old cliche of “chemistry,” maybe the pair just know how to push his tunes from solid up to stellar. But whatever creates this spark, it’s spurred Mascis to pack Farm with riff-heavy slacker classics that rival past gems like “Little Fury Things” and “Freak Scene.” Opener “Pieces” is a vintage display of Dinosaur Jr.’s knack for grafting unruly riffage to unabashedly bittersweet choruses. The lumbering “I Want You to Know” follows with chunky chords that sound both heavy and bright. As David Raposa pointed out in his recent track review, the tune is impressively assured, as if Mascis has shed the need to add an apologetic tone to his guitar anthems.
But even when Mascis is lyrically mopey, the music pulls this sad sack up off the couch. Take the caffeinated chug of slacker-self-help guide “Over It.” “Can I make it here?/Get over it,” Mascis tells himself. “I’ve been feeling weird/Get over it… I’ve been on the fence/Now it’s making sense I see.” Even better is the pity-filled “Plans.” The man who Thurston Moore imagined as Slacker President in Sonic Youth’s “Teen Age Riot” moans about pain, loss, and apathy—“I’ve got nothing left to be/Do you have some plans for me?” But the music’s adrenalized bounce makes his misery more sweet than sad. In Farm’s world, a good melody cures all ills.
As catchy and well-crafted as these songs are, they never feel restricted or overly polished. Each track is given room to grow, stretching into extended intros, impulsive solos, and oft-repeated verses. The result is both shapely and sprawling, like the mossy cartoon characters on the album cover. The aching “Said the People” seems to climax with Mascis’ crying solo in the middle, but then spreads out into another great three minutes. “I Don’t Wanna Go There” sprawls into fuzzy detonations, like a mellowed version of Bug’s noise-bomb “Don’t.” And Barlow approaches his two excellent songs with similar openness, hitting especially hard on the dark “Your Weather.”
With Farm coming out around the same time as the first installment in Neil Young’s Archives project, it’s tempting to make a grand statement about Mascis and Dinosaur Jr. as heirs to the Young and Crazy Horse throne. Young’s genius is pretty inimitable, but there is something about this band—the way they mix noisy guitar and punk-ish slam with sugared melodies and faded choruses—that’s Young-worthy. And as long as J, Lou, and Murph keep shooting as high as Farm, they’ll end up with the kind of discography worth buying over and over again. | 2009-06-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-06-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | June 22, 2009 | 8.5 | 54996caa-a455-4f5d-9db0-2a5043a603ba | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The All Dogs leader adds a rock band behind much of her second solo album, but she somehow sounds more alone on those songs than on the record’s unflinching acoustic tunes. | The All Dogs leader adds a rock band behind much of her second solo album, but she somehow sounds more alone on those songs than on the record’s unflinching acoustic tunes. | Yowler: Black Dog in My Path | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yowler-black-dog-in-my-path/ | Black Dog in My Path | The acoustic guitar is not a warm instrument in the hands of Yowler’s Maryn Jones. Instead, she uses it to conjure icy, barren settings, never offering the illusion that she’s playing in the same room as you. Her voice quiet but piercing, the All Dogs leader and former Saintseneca member insinuates a space around herself, as if she were shooting off a considered warning to someone at the edge of earshot. Even when Yowler’s second album, Black Dog in My Path, swaps acoustic guitars for electric ones or pads the sound with the help of a band, its chill never breaks. These songs come bearing no comfort—only stark, unflinching contemplation.
Yowler’s 2015 debut, The Offer, was a sparse, spectral collection. But several musicians from Jones’ new home of Philadelphia contribute this time, including Empath’s Catherine Elicson and Swearin’ singer Kyle Gilbride, who co-produced these dozen tunes. The contrast between Yowler as a solo project and Yowler as a full band is most striking on “Holy Fire,” which begins with Jones’ familiar mode of multitracked vocals and fingerpicked guitar. But her voice fades to a murmur as drums and a wail of distortion crash around her. Cello slashes through the noise as Jones’ voice careens away, dissolving inside the intrusion. The words she sang delicately in the song’s first act—“Holy fire from the center of the earth/Take me under back to where I’ve been”—feel like a prayer for intervention, answered by this violent interruption.
Black Dog veers between big, expressive moments and gentle retreats into hard-won intimacy, like the lovelorn “Petals” or the droning, starry-eyed “Aldebaran.” It’s these quieter, more desolate songs where she finds resolve. For her, the strength to live through the sick world comes softly, in spats of acoustic chords and tape hiss. The loudest numbers on Black Dog, like “Where Is My Light” and “WTFK,” share little with All Dogs’ pop-punk feistiness. Even on those songs, Jones rarely raises her voice above the level of her acoustic numbers, so the electric accompaniment sounds more like a threat than a bolster. Because there are more places for her to get lost, Jones seems more alone on the full-band tracks than she does on the quiet guitar numbers.
Jones’ words don’t offer a clear way out of these uneasy moments, and the loudest gestures often smuggle the most hopeless sentiments. “WTFK,” the album’s most musically accessible moment, pairs funk guitars with biting lines about a drowning planet and the evil in desire: “Sick fucking world/And where do I get off?” she asks in exasperation. On “Sorrow,” in a soft bid for self-soothing, she imagines her music resonating beyond her lifetime: “I just want to feel like there’s a point/To all these lines… I hope I can at least leave something behind.” Jones ends Black Dog with her heels dug into the ground. “Have you ever felt so bad/You cannot cry?” she asks during the closer. “I bear the mark, I am sigil/To the spirits and the sprites/But I promised not to listen/And stay in my life.” In the world she builds here, touched by magic and floating just above hell, evil is real, but so is resilience. There’s no triumph in the finale, no final burst of energy to drown out the dark. There’s just that dark and the guts it takes to sit through it. | 2018-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | October 17, 2018 | 7.6 | 549b3670-3985-4054-9e10-58db2dcef2ad | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
On an album of brutalist, MIDI-driven piano fugues and a double CD of languid ambient drones, the German electronic musician shows off two distinct sides of his musical personality. | On an album of brutalist, MIDI-driven piano fugues and a double CD of languid ambient drones, the German electronic musician shows off two distinct sides of his musical personality. | Thomas Brinkmann: A 1000 Keys / A Certain Degree of Stasis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22304-a-1000-keys-a-certain-degree-of-stasis/ | A 1000 Keys / A Certain Degree of Stasis | To hear Thomas Brinkmann tell it, his childhood piano lessons were more traumatic than most. A self-described musical dyslexic, he struggled to decipher the marks on the page, while the rest of his family members took to the instrument with virtuosic skill. Brinkmann sought his escape in make-believe: He pretended that his grandfather’s harmonium was the cockpit of an airplane. Yanking knobs and stomping pedals, he imagined himself wrestling the truculent beast through the most difficult takeoffs and landings.
With A 1000 Keys, Brinkmann finally gets his revenge on the instrument. Dedicated to Conlon Nancarrow, the modernist composer who wrote extensively for the player piano, it is an ornery, brutish album that hammers like a migraine, which is the sole aspect of the piano that he emphasizes. (To underscore that point, the album opens with three minutes of what sounds like mechanized blast beats.) There are no melodies here, just a steady, MIDI-driven pummel of chord clusters: Imagine a set of pistons suspended over the keys, striking over and over until the ivory cracks and the ebony splinters. There are occasional breaks from the assault in the form of languid, atonal fantasias—played according to the same principle, basically, just with the tempo slowed way down and the sustain pedal held to the floor. The throbbing “TLV,” one of a few tracks for organ, sounds like his grandfather's harmonium has been set on fire.
This being Brinkmann, there’s method to his mashing. Whether slicing records with razor blades or sampling Continental philosophers, the German electronic musician has always been part trickster and part theoretician. To create the music, Brinkmann apparently translated the frequencies corresponding to A440 tuning, or standard concert pitch, to binary code, and then used the 1s and 0s as sequencer data. That interest in the interchangeability of rhythm and frequency extends from his last album, What You Hear (Is What You Hear), in which seemingly static pitches gradually opened up to reveal an all-encompassing throb—except where that record inscribed graceful moiré patterns in thin air, A 1000 Keys tackles the subject with the grim determination of a jackhammer operator.
Treating frequency as a kind of readymade is one way of flipping the bird at all those composers whose work he failed to learn as a boy; the album’s methods, and its skepticism of authorial genius, invoke both Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique and Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. But there's nonetheless something unmistakably expressive about these gruff, pugilistic miniatures. As if owning up to it, he even titles the tracks after the three-letter codes of various international airports: “JFK,” “SFO,” “LHR,” and so forth. The press release frames the titles in terms of sterile “non-places,” but I think it’s just the opposite: Is it a coincidence that the lurching “CGN” mimics the rhythmic signature of classic Cologne techno? Far from flattening the frequency spectrum into interchangeable strings of digits, those references to faraway places underscore the vast range of destinations made possible by Brinkmann's brutalist flights of fancy.
Where A 1000 Keys is hard, A Certain Degree of Stasis is soft; where one is percussive, the other is liquid, with a sound like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music melted down and poured into Gastr Del Sol’s swirling organ drones. Where the former is ostensibly process music, there's no indication of how the latter was made. The double-CD set, released by Helsinki’s fledgling Frozen Reeds label, home to recordings from Julius Eastman and Morton Feldman, feels less like a musical composition than a piece of installation art—a sensation that’s reinforced both by its cover art, a detail of a piece by the visual artist Agnes Lux, and by the instructions that its two discs may be played separately, together, or along with any other Frozen Reeds release. Just for fun, I tried out both discs alongside Kevin Drumm’s Imperial Horizon, and the effect was pretty sublime.
On both discs—each comprises a single, 48-minute track—the “melody,” as it were, resembles the creak of a metal gate on rusty hinges; the atmosphere is as muggy as the heat before a summer storm. There are no discernible musical events, just lighter and darker streaks of dissonance, like smudges on battered brass. After a while, you begin hearing things that may or may not actually be in the recording. Are those wind chimes? Crickets? Is Glenn Branca leading a procession of electric guitarists through the tall, dry grass? Play both discs at once, and the sensation multiplies tenfold, leaving you wrapped in a cocoon of auditory illusions.
To those unfamiliar with the full scope of Brinkmann’s work, there’s little to suggest that both albums are by the same artist, even though they share in common a doggedness that could be exhausting to anyone in search of a simpler, more readily digestible listening experience. The excess of A Certain Degree of Stasis is almost absurd, except that it isn’t; to stop time and allow listeners to disappear into these fields of color requires painting on an enormous canvas. Even Brinkmann’s biggest fans may be surprised at how emotionally resonant and flat-out gorgeous these dissonant ambient studies are. If A 1000 Keys finds Brinkmann grappling with the controls of the imaginary airplanes of his childhood, with A Certain Degree of Stasis, he breaks through the clouds and soars. | 2016-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | September 30, 2016 | 7.8 | 549be176-1fec-48e2-a22c-d6f48da26de9 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The latest edition of Numero Group’s Wayfaring Strangers compilation series highlights forgotten artists who played a strain of country music in the early ’70s that mixed psychedelic rock with rootsy twanging. | The latest edition of Numero Group’s Wayfaring Strangers compilation series highlights forgotten artists who played a strain of country music in the early ’70s that mixed psychedelic rock with rootsy twanging. | Various Artists: Wayfaring Strangers: Cosmic American Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21670-wayfaring-strangers-cosmic-american-music/ | Wayfaring Strangers: Cosmic American Music | Given the increasingly indulgent nature of psychedelic music at its 1960s LSD peak, a few rock artists began to pull back from the edge. Bob Dylan, the Band, the Byrds, and the Grateful Dead all unplugged and looked to their roots for a more rustic, homegrown sound. This sometimes resulted in a turn toward country music, though it wasn’t the conservative fare of Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” or George Jones’s abject “The Poor Chinee.” Call it “cosmic country,” where the swell of a pedal steel suggests a dilation of spacetime rather than the heart swooning on a barroom floor, its practitioners sporting the shaggy locks of Gram Parsons instead of the pompadoured Conway Twitty.
This particular strain of early ’70s music is the underlying theme of Numero Group’s sixth entry in the Wayfaring Strangers series, culled from private-press gems and dollar-bin purgatory alike. Previous editions featured Joni Mitchell wannabes, heavy-metal doofuses, and sterling Tacoma-style steel-string players to varying degrees of success. Cosmic American Music’s 19-tracks document what wholly unknown folks laid to tape in-between the inaugural flight of the Flying Burrito Brothers in the late ’60s and Waylon and Willie's outlaw hijacking of Nashville a few years later. It’s a sound that’s been compiled often as of late, from Light in the Attic’s groove-rooted Country Funk sets to Orion Read’s dusty and downhome Small Town Country series, though this set doesn’t have the same drum-centered focus of the former nor the quaint, country colloquialisms of the latter.
More often than not, the music here has more kin in ’60s rock than in countrypolitan. Deerfield’s “Me Lovin’ You” still bears some Byrds harmonies and garage-rock fuzz alongside its steel guitar, while Plain Jane’s boy-girl vocals on “You Can’t Make It Alone” emulate Marty Balin and Grace Slick rather than George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Dan Pavlides’ off-key “Lily of the Valley” boasts a guitar lick that quotes the Kink’s “Big Sky,” and White Cloud’s “All Cried Out” has a shaky, cracked warble not unlike Neil Young at his most plaintive.
As is the case with most sets of forgotten songs that never quite got to be heard, idiosyncratic sounds abound. There’s a cosmic ray blast that flares up on “Lonely Entertainer,” and I don’t think anyone in country has ever done a jazz-funk odyssey about buffalo outside of Bill Madison’s eight-minute “Buffalo Skinners.” A few of the overlooked folks here have already been the subjects of reissue, and they stand out. The cool, lo-fi rockabilly chug and old rock’n’roll vocals of Kenny Knight’s “Baby’s Back” were already revived in the 21st century thanks to Paradise of Bachelors. And F.J. MacMahon, whose one loner folk album, Spirit of the Golden Juice, was briefly reissued on Sacred Bones and still goes for ludicrous sums online. But for the most part, the songs on Cosmic American Music slip into the ether without much to keep them earthbound. | 2016-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Numero Group | March 17, 2016 | 6.2 | 549c3ba0-b5c6-4cff-9483-4c05054e080b | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Intimate yet cinematic, the Japanese musician’s new two-part album exchanges her colorful pop patchwork for soft, luminous ambient music of alien beauty and human warmth. | Intimate yet cinematic, the Japanese musician’s new two-part album exchanges her colorful pop patchwork for soft, luminous ambient music of alien beauty and human warmth. | Tujiko Noriko: Crépuscule I & II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tujiko-noriko-crepuscule-i-ii/ | Crépuscule I & II | Tujiko Noriko’s music has never felt entirely of this world. From the curious tumult of early albums like Shojo Toshi and Make Me Hard, it was possible to imagine the Osaka native—since the early 2000s, a resident of the Parisian suburbs—as an intergalactic observer of earthling culture intent upon recreating the planet’s music out of radio-telescope transmissions and scraps of space junk. Tujiko professed to make pop music, yet her songs bubbled over with chaos: a hodgepodge of distorted organs, clacking typewriters, and cats’ meows, all of it suffused in digital glitches and analog grit. Her arrangements seemed governed by the logic of Saturday-morning cartoons—sticky blobs of supersaturated color unbound by gravity—and her high, breathy voice telegraphed a sense of childlike wonder. But despite her cheerful disregard for convention, there was nothing naive about her work; it was clear she knew exactly what she was doing. “I usually start out with a classic structure,” she once told an interviewer. “Melody, lyric, singing. But I almost can’t stop myself from making it a little bit strange and even uncomfortable sometimes.” Not for the sake of being difficult, she added. “I just like to experiment. I like to use a frame, but to try to shake the frame a little bit.”
More than two decades since she began recording, Tujiko’s output has slowed from the fevered pace she kept up in the 2000s; her last solo album was 2014’s My Ghost Comes Back, a cozily sentimental record wrapped in mandolin, musical saw, and other unusual acoustic timbres. Since then she has released only two titles, Kuro and Surge, both soundtracks; perhaps not coincidentally, an unmistakably cinematic influence is audible in the evocatively hushed atmospheres of her new album Crépuscule I & II. This time, Tujiko hasn’t so much shaken the frame as swapped in a whole new camera. Gone are the whimsy, the crunch, the surfeit of stimuli that once made the act of listening to her music feel like sensory overload. In their place, she has summoned an hour and 46 minutes of soft, luminous ambient music of alien beauty and human warmth.
The album is divided across two discs: roughly speaking, one of songs and another of soundscapes, although the line between those two modes is often notional. Disc 1 opens with a short, wistful instrumental that glistens like a fistful of beach glass: Tujiko’s playing is tentative, her timekeeping halting, apparently untethered to the computer’s internal clock. This ruminative mood deepens across the album as the titular twilight darkens. The next song, “The Promenade Vanishes,” prominently featuring her voice, is equally spare. Like its predecessor, it feels like a live performance, though delicate layering and other electronic effects—not to mention earth-shakingly low sub-bass—attest to digital processes carried out behind the scenes.
Tujiko’s work was once driven by its contrasts, but here, everything blends so smoothly that determining where one track ends and another begins can require careful attention. “Fossil Words,” “Cosmic Ray,” and “Flutter” flow together across the middle portion of Disc 1, comprising a three-song suite for voice, keyboard, and silence whose hushed air and lengthy reverb suggest a halfway point between Grouper and Harold Budd. Though her melodies often feel as ephemeral as a word scratched into the sand at low tide, the songwriting here is more clearly defined than in the maze-like meandering of previous albums. And her voice has never sounded better, whether front and center or drifting like a wisp of smoke.
Disc 2 consists of three long, amorphous tracks totaling nearly an hour. The vibe remains largely the same as on the first disc, just stretched and smeared, like paint beneath a squeegee. On “Golden Dusk,” she paints a picture of idyll in burnished synths and emotionally resonant field recordings: a children’s playground, backmasked bell tones, wind brushing against the grille of the microphone. The 24-minute “Roaming Over Land, Sea and Air” is a ballad in the guise of a nebulous tone poem, sketching the outline of a memory (“In the car park by your side/I laughed so hard/So hard I cried and fell… Over this ice/We were skating, skating”) over hazy chimes. “Don’t Worry, I’ll Be Here” is the most shapeless of the three, burying soft murmurs in dissonant, roiling dusk. A more cautious or exacting artist might have edited these pieces down to four or five minutes apiece, but Tujiko is content to let them sprawl. And though they don’t bring any new textures or emotions to the album, it hardly matters. As an invitation to linger indefinitely and wander at will across the expanse of Tujiko’s singular universe, the splintering of the frame is a welcome development. | 2023-01-19T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-19T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Editions Mego | January 19, 2023 | 8 | 549d1173-ad00-4749-acb5-192e9a95fc39 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Tobias Jesso Jr. has a knack for writing songs that you feel like you’ve heard before, even if you can’t quite pin down a precise antecedent. Which is another way of saying he writes songs that sound "classic" in the best sense of the word. | Tobias Jesso Jr. has a knack for writing songs that you feel like you’ve heard before, even if you can’t quite pin down a precise antecedent. Which is another way of saying he writes songs that sound "classic" in the best sense of the word. | Tobias Jesso Jr.: Goon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20153-goon/ | Goon | At some point it became clear that one of the themes for the first quarter of 2015 would be The Return of the Male Piano Balladeer. Upcoming records from Father John Misty, Matthew E. White, and new kid/not-kid Tobias Jesso Jr. (he’s 29) would all center on an archetype now associated mostly with the 1970s: the weary dude, wise beyond his years, spinning tales of love and loss from his piano bench before moving over to a barstool. It’s an image that took hold during the '60s hangover, when baby boomers traded youthful dreams and started becoming their parents, a little less certain with each new season that they were, in fact, still crazy after all these years. This highly personal, smaller-scale music was less about The World and more about the geography of a wounded heart. Jesso, Misty and White, in their own ways, are all drawn to a similar directness, a love of the well-written song composed and performed solo.
Hearing Tobias Jesso Jr.’s album, Goon, it turns out he has less in common with his peers than we thought. Father John Misty’s J. Tillman is by far the most literate and complicated of the three songwriters, using a fictional persona to plumb the depths of his own desires and self-loathing. Matthew E. White is more producer and arranger than singer-songwriter, someone who lets the horn arrangements and mic placement do the talking. And Tobias Jesso Jr. is ultimately more of a wide-eyed innocent, a songwriter with a naturally expressive voice who has a McCartney-like propensity for melody and an innate drive toward simplicity.
In the late '60s and early '70s, L.A. singer-songwriters like Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, and Tom Waits got their start by writing songs for others, playing small clubs on Sunset, and skulking around record label offices. Jesso did try writing for others, but his rise could only happen on the Internet: Some songs posted to YouTube, an exchange with an admired producer (in the case of Jesso, Girls' JR White), a debut record on a hip label, and a "The Tonight Show" appearance before the LP even comes out. This isn’t just luck, of course—Jesso already had some connections from his time living and working in music in Los Angeles and a few famous friends, and his little label is part of the indie juggernaut Beggars Group. But if his quick ascent owes a lot to living in a networked world, his music sounds as natural as breathing. Jesso has a knack for writing songs that you feel like you’ve heard before, even if you can’t quite pin down a precise antecedent. Which is another way of saying he writes songs that sound "classic" in the best sense of the word.
The highlights here sound like songs that could be covered and interpreted any number of ways by other vocalists, with a rock-solid melodic and harmonic foundation. "How Could You Babe" is among them, moving from slow, halting verses that build tension until the glorious release of the chorus. On the last refrain, Jesso pushes his voice in its upper register to the point where it cracks, a clever suggestion of desperation that speaks to his intuitive sense of phrasing. "The Wait" is a two-minute acoustic pop confection featuring Jesso on guitar, a weightless gem that floats by like a freshly blown dandelion seed. A pair of songs, "Hollywood" and "Leaving LA", hint at Jesso’s background as a journeyman musician in Los Angeles, but the main idea behind virtually every song is the precariousness of love and affection.
Fans of those YouTube demos had to wonder how Jesso’s intimate music might hold up to studio glare, but Jesso’s producers (White handled eight songs, Pat Carney of Black Keys two, and Ariel Rechtshaid one) treat his music with a simplicity that suggests utter confidence in the material. The songwriter’s voice, piano chords, and plucked acoustic are the focus, and bits of light drumming and the odd back-up vocal are often the only augmentation. The approach leads to songs that feel unusually whole. You couldn't imagine taking anything away from these songs, and it's equally hard to imagine adding anything. "Leaving LA" is a masterpiece of sonic understatement, moving between solo piano and a blissful interlude of voices and what sounds like harpsichord. "Bad Words" finds Jesso’s voice pinched and distant next to a Fender Rhodes and subtle drumming. His vocal line and piano move in unison on "For You" as a violin saws away in the background; it all bleeds together until it feels like a single, intricately textured sound.
If Jesso seems to have a Burt Bacharach-like command of how verses, choruses, and bridges can add up to more than the sum of their parts, he’s got a ways to go before giving Hal David a run for his money with the pen. The words are here to serve the music, to fit the rhythm and cadence of the tune rather than the other way around. In a couple of places ("Crocodile Tears" and "Can We Still Be Friends", which sounds disconcertingly like the theme song from "Cheers") that can lead to rhyme schemes so predictable in their girl/world obviousness as to become a distraction. But these moments are few, and Jesso overcomes them as McCartney did—with the sweetness of his voice. "There’s a thing called hate/ And a thing called love, too/ Like the love I have for your Mom/ And for you" reads awkwardly on the page, but Jesso’s smooth musical diction makes it sound almost wise. His voice couldn’t be any more suited to this kind of music if it was created in a lab, but beyond just hitting the notes he also has a great feel for inflection, how to squeeze the most out of every syllable and transition.
With its clear debt to a specific era, Goon has a meta quality, an album of music that illustrates the power of music. While the songs are almost all about heartbreak, they could be more likely to have you ruminating about the role music plays in heartbreak instead of the emotional pain itself, but this distancing effect, in which the songs unfold so patiently, doesn’t diminish the record’s pleasures. Of the trio of 2015 songwriters mentioned above, Jesso sounds the most like Nilsson, in terms of the grain of his voice and his ability to sound wounded while also floating just above his travails, but his music is very different in spirit; Jesso’s approach is to state things plainly, dress them up in a gorgeous tune, and sit down and deliver it in the most spare and economical manner possible. Goon isn’t an album of layers; what you hear is what you get, which in this case turns out to be something special. | 2015-03-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-03-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | True Panther | March 16, 2015 | 8.5 | 54a026c2-22e7-42a1-be08-bfde757eb7e7 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
XL founder Richard Russell’s collaborative project brings out an unfiltered, unrehearsed freshness in its guests that the album can’t quite manage for itself. | XL founder Richard Russell’s collaborative project brings out an unfiltered, unrehearsed freshness in its guests that the album can’t quite manage for itself. | Everything Is Recorded: Friday Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/everything-is-recorded-friday-forever/ | Friday Forever | The second album from XL Recordings boss Richard Russell as Everything Is Recorded is obsessed with ending from the moment it starts. Friday Forever chronologically documents a Friday night out, with track titles time-stamped to mark the journey from Uber to bathroom stall to hangover. Near the beginning of the album, drone-folk artist Maria Somerville intones, “The night won’t last forever.” Moments later, London singer and rapper Berwyn flips her ominous warning into a more upbeat refrain. The words appear again throughout the album, an effect that seeks to capture the underlying nihilism and mortality of nightlife. Russell is an expert on the subject of raving, as his time in 1990s electronic duo Kicks Like a Mule attests. But Friday Forever never quite sheds its inhibitions to achieve euphoria.
Russell’s obsession with the fleeting nature of time also influenced a new composition process, one more fluid and spontaneous than his 2018 self-titled debut. He generated percussion on “10:51PM/The Night” by banging on the floor and banister of his recording studio, and the result is loose and urgent. But as a noted crate-digger, DJ, and co-founder of the label that brought the world Adele, the Prodigy, and Dizzee Rascal, Russell’s greatest talent is his ability to spot and nurture talent in others. On Friday Forever, he doesn’t just collate voices, but brings out an unfiltered, unrehearsed freshness. On “02:56AM/I Don’t Want This Feeling to Stop,” the magnetic south London MC Flohio semi-improvises over a twisted sample of reggae singer Mikey Dread’s “Dizzy,” hyping herself with off-the-cuff ad-libs.
Friday Forever’s talent roster is younger and lesser-known than that of Everything Is Recorded, and the album is bolder and brighter for it. When Ghostface Killah shows up for a comical verse on “03:15AM/Caviar,” the effect is mildly jarring—his voice is too familiar, too weighty. Flohio and Mancunian rapper Aitch are deft and charismatic, but the record’s breakout star is Berwyn, a Trinidad-born, London-raised artist who has yet to release his own debut. At the album’s peak, “1:32AM/Walk Alone,” he weaves between Infinite Coles’ futuristic R&B stylings and Russell’s blown-out bass with lithe precision.
The sheer number of collaborators, however, can make the record feel crowded. Russell finds beauty in the dissonance between them—there’s a quiet poignancy when Ghostface appears on the same track as his son, Infinite Coles, one delivering straightforward bars, the other drifting melodically in and out of falsetto. But elsewhere, it can feel scattershot. The universality of the concept—that anyone and everyone loves a Friday night out—breeds a lack of specificity. Irish singer Kean Kavanagh’s bleary-eyed hangover song and skit are charming, thanks to his breezy and unaffected performance, but the over-conceived storytelling feels hollow.
So while wistful strings and the warm voice of Crass co-founder Penny Rimbaud on “11:59AM/Circles (Outro)” fulfill the narrative function of an album closer, as a piece of music, it feels thin. Rimbaud’s final meditation on the passage of time (“temporal... yet eternal”) doesn’t hit as hard as it could, considering how often we’ve heard that “the night won’t last forever.” There’s nothing spontaneous about a constant reminder to carpe diem. Likewise, Russell’s take on nightlife feels studied. For a man who’s lived and breathed rave culture, his album about the experience is strangely lacking in highs.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | April 10, 2020 | 6.1 | 54a2933f-f81a-4699-86d2-04da30a1cb2c | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
1:00am: I've gathered my supplies and I'm going to sit this one straight through. Trent's going ... | 1:00am: I've gathered my supplies and I'm going to sit this one straight through. Trent's going ... | Nine Inch Nails: The Fragile | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5799-the-fragile/ | The Fragile | 1:00am: I've gathered my supplies and I'm going to sit this one straight through. Trent's going to keep me up for at least another two hours with his latest bloated indulgence, The Fragile. So I've got a pot of coffee. It's black. Pitch black. As black as your fucking soul! And I'm typing on this machine. This machine is grinding me down. I feel like a fucking machine! Grrrarrrgh!
9:00pm: My first experience with The Fragile, as is the case with most new CDs, comes in my Honda. I'm sitting at a red light on Webster and Damen, waiting for a left turn. Trent Reznor is screaming, "Tear a hole exquisite red/ Fuck the rest and stab it dead" over a troop of industrial guitars and digital whining. I yawn with such stretching intensity that I miss my turn light. The entire situation strikes me as particularly humorous. Here I am-- a 24- year- old white guy with floppy bangs, wearing a tie, driving a Honda-- and all the bile Trent Reznor can must muster up from his supposedly scorched soul makes me yawn.
Sometime over the last decade, music that is intrinsically meant to be menacing (i.e. Nine Inch Nails) has become a banal syndicated- action hour soundtrack. It's easy to imagine the overproduced grind of "The Wretched" blaring through a TV screen as Nightman kicks a henchman off a roof. This stuff could be the score to "The Crow 4: In Space." And this time around, Trent has unanimously failed to shock anyone above the age of 15 and under the age of 54. I mean, have you listened to old Judas Priest lately? Now, this is not to say music must be confrontational, although the best of it typically is. However, in a pop society that has become numb to industrial sounds through ESPN2 and Surge commercials, it's no longer interesting or tolerable to base one's entire output on volume and amplified cliches.
And so "Somewhat Damaged" continues to pound out its same four notes. Systematically, layers of crust, fuzz, dirt, and whatever else Reznor can scrape off the walls in his studio are piled on top, pounding out the same four- note scale. 1-2-3-4. 1-2-3-4. 1-2-3-4. Ooh, wow, did he just say "fuck?" Trent, Holden Caulfield rubbed that out 50 years ago.
8:00pm: "Hello?" asks Ryan.
"Okay, I'm going to read you something," I say.
"Oh, hey dude. Um, sure."
"'She shines/ In a world full of ugliness/ She matters/ When everything is meaningless.'"
"Oh, man."
"'Sometimes I have everything/ Yet I wish I felt something.'"
"Are these lyrics?"
"'Underneath it all/ We feel so small/ The Heavens fall / But still we crawl.'"
"Haha. What is this?"
"Pleading and/ Needing and/ Bleeding and/ Breeding and/ Feeding/ Exceeding."
"Rhyme-y."
"Now everything is clear/ I can erase the fear/ I can disapper."
"Man, what is this. Is this some emo album?"
"I am every fucking thing and just a little more/ And when I suck you off not a drop will go to waste/ It's really not so bad, you know, once you get past the taste, yeah/ Starfuckers."
"No. Oh, no. No. It's Nine Inch Nails!"
1:49am: "Even Deeper," a track mixed by Dr. Dre, spits aluminum riffs into my headphones. The entire concept of pairing of Dr. Dre and Nine Inch Nails, a match maid in Kornboy heaven (or most likely the Interscope commissary) is laughable. Shuffling beats squirt under "Blade Runner" booms and fathoms of string samples. The end product sounds entirely similar to the rest of this 104- minute albatross. The token celebrity stroking of this studio marriage is fittingly overwrought, unnecessary and done with questionable intent. From the sound of it, Trent cares little to broaden his palate from this rap/ rock union. Without the liner notes, one would never pick this song as "the Dr. Dre track."
Ironically, a man hailed by his legion of testoster- drones as "genius" often leans heavily on the work of other, better sound wizards. Adrian Belew, Steve Albini, and Alan Moulder conspicuously leave their fingerprints all over The Fragile. In other words, whenever something sounds cool, it's most likely coming from one of these other men, who have worked on such mind- blowing classics like Talking Heads' Remain in Light, Slint's Spiderland, and My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, respectively. The constipated drone of "The Day the World Went Away" unabashedly attempts to mimic My Bloody Valentine's sculpted cacophony. Unfortunately, from the hands of an unsubtle goth, the result is strained fuzz.
2:00am: Trent Reznor is the worst, most predictable, most uninspired lyricist working today. The freshman gloom spouted throughout The Fragile are only making it easier for the Goth Lyric Generators on the web. Copy the word decay from this sentence. Paste it into a Word document. Highlight it. Press Shift-F7. Every synonym that appears on your thesaurus screen pops up in Trent Renzor's pitiful poetry. Coming from the mouth of a steadily plumping, thirtysomething recluse (who, incidentally, is bearing striking resemblance to Phil Hartman's SNL Frankenstein character these days), it's just sad. Does he collect candelabras and "Spawn" comics? I guarantee it. In the five years it's taken to complete The Fragile, Trent seemingly watched Dark City at least 40 times. It's insulting to hear Trent and his PR firm talk up the "radical departure" and pop flourishes on this record because the record sounds 100% similar to Broken and The Downward Spiral. Or more accurately, it's like combining Broken and The Downward Spiral. Clever.
2:45am: The gentle piano plunking of "La Mer" lulls me to sleep momentarily on its second time around. It's not the gentle ambience of it, though, since this loud sludge could knock out a speed addict. The Fragile is the most taxing record I've ever had to work through in my five years of reviewing CDs. I mean, even the Beatles failed to make a double album without throwing in some filler. Why does Trent Reznor thinking he can succeed? I'm actually glad Billy Corgan used up The Infinite Sadness. Reznor would jump all over a title like that.
It's difficult to decide where to even begin trimming The Fragile. It's so stunningly monotonous. Any bit of it could be lost without notice. I mean, when the instrumental interludes carry an album, it's a blaring neon sign flashing "stay away!" I pity the kids of the style- over- substance generation-- and yes, it will only be kids-- who enjoy this album. Kids, high school isn't as bad as it seems. You'll grow out of this phase. Save yourself, or your parents, the 25 bucks. The Fragile's length begins to make sense in this context. 104 minutes is the perfect duration for those post- dinner, pre- "X-Files" periods of "nobody understands me" bedroom isolation sit-ins.
3:00am: Before getting back into The Fragile, I peruse the liner notes and artwork. David Carson of "Raygun" fame laid out the artwork for The Fragile. And what a fitting look! Carson, whose design work broke new ground for typography, lost touch years ago. The originator of the 1990s' trademark "crusty look" is analogous to the fat- bottomed disco fonts of the '70s or the thin sans- serif of deco. But guess what? It's almost 2000 and the world needs a new look and a new sound. Carson and Reznor will forever be remembered as 1990s pop figures that helped create an identifiable logo for the decade, and little else. Trent, you are Flock of Seagulls. The Fragile embodies everything wrong with this decade-- hype, letdown, technological fetishism, empty rage, financial bloat, bombast, self- loathing, and indifference to anything truly important and interesting flowing underneath the surface. Trent Reznor is Chris Gaines.
3:20am: "Starfuckers, Inc." That's pretty much all I have to say in criticism of this album. That sums it right up. Do you or don't you want to own an album with a song called "Starfuckers, Inc?" Besides the snickering potty- mouthed title, it's one of the most blatantly hypocritical attacks ever put to tape. It's a widely- publicized attack on Marilyn Manson. There are several lyrical references to the gangly idiot such as "I'm one of the beautiful ones" and "My god pouts on the cover of a magazine." And how are these jabs delivered? Why, in a song which sounds exactly like Marilyn Manson (and also borrows from Carly Simon), by a man who pouts on the cover of Rolling Stone, Alternative Press, Spin, etc.
In essence, Reznor is Marilyn Manson without the makeup (which is a bit like Kiss without the makeup). The Fragile is simply Music for 'The Elder for the digital age. I take comfort knowing that the passing of another decade will make this record seem as amusingly insincere as 10CC.
And at this point, I'm angry, hungry, and frustrated. In fact, I feel like kinda like Trent Reznor. Is this the grand design? After over two hours of listening to his incessant whining and grating, I've become the very model of his audience. | 1999-09-21T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 1999-09-21T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope / Nothing | September 21, 1999 | 2 | 54af8cb6-bdbc-4ed1-8fbf-fe6202611630 | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | null |
On this introspective collaborative EP, the electronic artists find an uneasy symbiosis of their distinctive styles. | On this introspective collaborative EP, the electronic artists find an uneasy symbiosis of their distinctive styles. | TSVI / Loraine James: 053 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tsvi-loraine-james-053/ | 053 | TSVI’s music is ruthlessly efficient. It wasn’t always that way; eight years ago, the Italian-born, London-based artist (Guglielmo Barzacchini, aka Anunaku) was making chrome-plated electro funk indebted to the sound of Bok Bok’s Night Slugs label, with fluorescent-hued chords swimming in humid reverb. But in recent years, his music has gotten steelier and more unforgiving. The drums have sharpened; the tone colors have leached out. His most recent solo release, last year’s Sogno EP, fused dancehall and tech-step with military precision; the drums were so dry, there might have been silica gel packs in the mix.
The British experimental electronic musician Loraine James, on the other hand, trades in barely controlled chaos: hair-trigger beats, jittery vocal samples, little twisters of white noise. Like a bull in a semiconductor factory, her drums lurch dangerously, threatening to shatter the groove with every syncopation; her chords spill over the grid like inkblots on graph paper. And on recent releases—particularly the self-titled album under her new alias Whatever the Weather—a sentimental ambient sensibility has settled in like a pastel haze. So what happens when two such diametrically opposed styles come together? Rather than matter annihilating antimatter, they establish an uneasy kind of symbiosis, with TSVI’s tough, armor-plated drums punching through James’ architecture of unpredictability.
Some tracks are more balanced than others. On “Awaiting,” it would be easy to miss Barzacchini’s fingerprints entirely. The song begins with a ruminative string of piano notes, like Harold Budd sitting absentmindedly at a waterlogged upright. It could be an outtake from Whatever the Weather, at least until a muted kick drum sullenly sidles into view, tracing circles like a hungry shark. Two opposing drum tracks compete for control: One’s a spartan snare that does little more than keep time; the other’s a periodic eruption of breakbeats that seems hellbent on obliterating it. High above, an angel choir coos wordlessly, as though mourning the destruction below. Those voices return on the EP’s final track, “Trust,” the only one without drums; again, you might easily assume its reverberant piano and gauzy pads were James’ work alone.
Other tracks offer a more integrated fusion of the two musicians’ styles. They recorded the EP while sharing a studio during London’s last lockdown period, and you can sense their presence in the room together, hands at the controls, feeling out each others’ instincts. “Gloom” molds the same basic elements from “Awaiting” into a tougher, more propulsive form. “Eternal” rises gradually, like a machine assembling itself from a scrap heap; battered, haphazard percussion is shaped into a slow, muscular groove haloed with a silvery synth melody. And “Observe” represents the apotheosis of their creative union, drawing out great, sweeping, melancholy synths over spring-loaded drum’n’bass cadences. Despite its greater rhythmic focus, no two bars sound quite the same. It flows like a conversation. At a moment when the smart money in dance music is on big, boisterous club anthems, this tangled, detuned, introspective EP is refreshing: an intimate picture of two friends shutting out the world and seeking a common language. | 2022-05-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | AD 93 | May 16, 2022 | 7.2 | 54aff222-88da-45ff-b382-3b5b01e1c3cb | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The first widely-released album from French-born, Montréal-based artist Joni Void is a found-sound project that reflects the anxiety of cities. | The first widely-released album from French-born, Montréal-based artist Joni Void is a found-sound project that reflects the anxiety of cities. | Joni Void: Selfless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joni-void-selfless/ | Selfless | Jean Cousin’s story to date has followed a typical 21st-century DIY-artist narrative. For the past six years, the Lille, France native has flooded his Bandcamp and Soundcloud pages with several self-produced albums. The first, soundtrack for a film that doesn’t exist, spelled out his m.o. in no uncertain terms; the second, still images & other dreams, provides a handy subtitle. And while Cousin assumed the sort of alias—Johnny Ripper—you’d expect of some bass-bin-rattling EDM deviant, his early music gently tiptoed along the porous borders separating post-rock, IDM, and modern classical, often sounding like a piano recital remixed by Boards of Canada. After moving to Montreal in 2012 to study film (a medium that informs both his music and visually enhanced live performances), he’s now found a natural home at Constellation Records. But if Constellation has given him the means to execute his first proper album release, Cousin is using the moment in the spotlight to make himself even more anonymous.
For his latest release, Johnny Ripper has been reborn as Joni Void, a nom de punk better than anything the creators of “Vinyl” could’ve come up with. But in the context of Selfless, it symbolizes absence as much as attitude. Where he once composed on piano, and even occasionally sang, Cousin approached Selfless as a purely found-sound project, with melodies and rhythms emerging from intricate editing rather than performed parts. The limited vocals we hear—spoken-word poems, guest raps, or even just breathing—were captured through field recordings or phone messages, a tactic that reinforces Cousin’s shadowy presence. At times, the malleable, corroded nature of his music yields to the crisply captured sound of Cousin manipulating his machinery, like the unseen wizard pulling levers from behind the curtain.
As he recently explained to Montreal’s CKUT: “The whole theme for the album was basically that it’s an out-of-body experience, through whatever means: music, death, psychedelics, just seeing some intense world news….” Cousin said that his intent is not to escape our troubled times, but to reflect and respect them—for him, now is not the time for introspection, but observation. After approaching his past records as soundtracks for films that didn’t exist, Cousin approaches Selfless more like a documentarian, outfitted with nothing but a dirty lens, decaying old film stock, and shaky hands to create, as one track calls it, “Cinema Without People.”
The opening “Song Siènne” serves to thrust Cousin from his hermetic, home-recording bubble into the world at large. At the outset, it’s a pretty but trembling piano piece, sounding not unlike Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” fed through The Disintegration Loops. But nearly two minutes in, the snowglobe serenity is abruptly shattered with what sounds like a hammer striking an anvil: the piano chords turn more intensely foreboding, the background is suffused with ambient street chatter, and suddenly the track acquires all the suffocating dread and confusion of feeling lost in a crowd in a foreign city where you don’t understand the signage.
But if “Song Siènne” evokes the anxieties of urban spaces, Cousin also playfully cuts through their tensions. On “Doppler,” he takes that most omnipresent city sound—a siren—and pitch-shifts it into, if not a full-blown techno track, then at least the blueprint for one. And as the record goes on, Cousin’s meticulous edits start to fortify into more robust rhythms: the aforementioned “Cinema Without People” is the album’s pulsating centerpiece, using the sound of a spinning film projector as the bedtrack for an oscillating, hypno-house throb. On “Abjection,” doomy drones are unleashed with industrial aggression, with Cousin stretching wordless voices into tortured wails and then snapping them back into nightmarish shrieks.
And yet as much as Selfless feels suited to soundtrack your next newsticker-induced panic attack, the album also functions as Cousin’s affectionate tribute to the Montréal DIY scene that encouraged him to perform live. A handful of tracks are given over to friends: “Observer (Natalie’s Song)” sets poet Natalie Reid’s plainspoken philosophies about social interactions to a swelling surge of clicks ‘n’ cuts; “Yung Werther (Ogun’s Song)” sees Tide Jewel spitting a voice-mailed invective about capitalism and police violence over a disorienting whirr of smashed glass, gunshots, and trap beats. But of the infinite sounds at Cousin’s disposal here, the most resonant are provided by Ayuko Goto (aka Noah) on “Empathy (Ayuko’s Song),” an analog-synth-smeared reverie from the late ’90s Warp playbook that’s propelled by her hushed whispers and panting breaths. Though its vocals are indecipherable, it’s the song that most clearly speaks to Selfless’ transcendent mission, hovering between the comforting intimacy of community and the unsettled essence of the outside world. And it’s a reminder that, even its quietest, most self-effacing moments, Selfless absolutely judders with physicality and viscera. | 2017-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Constellation | June 14, 2017 | 7.7 | 54b0fdd7-f5a1-4c18-b107-179342d0b216 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Chicago rapper’s debut LP is a daring and expressive album that explores the American web of love, faith, violence. | The Chicago rapper’s debut LP is a daring and expressive album that explores the American web of love, faith, violence. | Mick Jenkins: The Healing Component | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22431-the-healing-component/ | The Healing Component | Love has been the benzine in pop music’s tank since time immemorial. That’s because trying to pin down its meaning is like trying to crescent kick a waterfall—it is constantly being filtered and refiltered through a pop culture prism. Everyone from Walt Disney, to Ian Curtis, to André 3000 had their own takes. Yet here we are, in 2016, and Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins has released a concept album about love that finds fresh angles.
The cover to The Healing Component features the heart as it beats in the human chest. The organ is exposed, precious, vital—only ever a beat away from the end of a life. Jenkins’ album arrives in the backdrop of the shooting death of Terence Crutcher at the hands of police in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Not to mention black men and children killed in Ferguson, Cleveland, New York, Minnesota, and Baton Rouge. The rapper might preach love throughout—“Spread love, try to combat the sadness,” he demands on the title track—but he sounds like an optimist desperately reaching for the broken shards tearing away from his soul. This might be one of year’s best blues albums.
Jenkins broadly pitches love as humanity’s “healing component” as taught to him through scripture. “That’s what Jesus was down here to show us,” he tells an anonymous friend on one of the record’s segues. Inevitably, a record this much into religion will be stacked next to fellow Chi-Town lyricist Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book. But while Chancelor’s record came with a wave of saintly Christian sentiment, Jenkins engages with faith as a weapon to scorch America’s white patriarchy.
“How could a black man not be confused in this?/Used to hang by those trees, we abusing them now?” Jenkins asks on “Strange Love,” a slam poetry scrapbook of scattered thoughts. He’s long used water as a metaphor for knowledge (see 2014 mixtape The Water[s], in particular) but on “Drowning,” it takes on a more sinister tone: “When the real hold you down, you supposed to drown right?/Wait, wait, that don’t sound right.” The death of Eric Garner haunts the track further with chants of “I can’t breathe” as BADBADNOTGOOD’s down ‘n’ dirty instrumentation sounds like a funeral procession. Police brutality, institutionalized racism, and the disrespectful pilfering of black culture are all covered in Jenkins’ pad of rhymes. This is protest rap whose punches come from odd angles but still land the with the weight of a sledgehammer.
The Healing Component is a verbose album, like it’s caught the emcee on a savage trip through the corridors of his mind. Jenkins might drop Bible references, but his scriptures have been dipped in enough drugs to take down Hunter S. Thompson. On the spaced-out “100 Xans,” he admits to “tweaking and laughing ‘til I hurt ribs.” The instrumentation, too, snaps with an acid-soaked psychedelia. “Strange Love” is all midnight-blue swagger, slinking forward with its cosmic keys and slide guitars. “Communicate,” produced by Kaytranada, is the closest thing the record has to a radio jam. It’s a head-down groove under the flickering strobe lights of a neon-tinted basement club after last orders—the only song where a line like, “Want to call you bae and I don’t mean San Francisco” could work.
Jenkins’ previous EP, the bouncy *Wave[s]**, *plays like the rapper burning off the lighter tracks in his chamber—the stuff that thematically falls outside this album’s concept. *The Healing Component *would have benefitted for a couple of those brighter moments to keep things moving, but it’s a small gripe. This socially-scathing, Alprazolam-laced, Jesus piece-baring work slices like a knife. He can’t successfully pin down the nuances of love over 62 minutes, but he spits plenty of good bars. | 2016-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Cinematic / Free Nation | September 28, 2016 | 7.6 | 54b1103f-b825-4ce7-9ab1-e8c499a42ec3 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | null |
Accompanied by a like-minded troupe of intergalactic travelers, the Bitchin Bajas member brings together jazz composition with far-out electronic sound design. | Accompanied by a like-minded troupe of intergalactic travelers, the Bitchin Bajas member brings together jazz composition with far-out electronic sound design. | Rob Frye: Exoplanet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rob-frye-exoplanet/ | Exoplanet | Rob Frye spent much of the 2010s playing in Chicago’s Bitchin Bajas, whose goofy name belies an affinity for immersive, outward-bound music more in keeping with acid trips in cathedrals than the bratty surf punk that their handle implies. If you believe that one of music’s primary goals is to transport the listener from earthly concerns, you will find no more fuel-efficient vehicle to achieve this than Bitchin Bajas. As with the work of Terry Riley, Bitchin Bajas’ music scans as both lysergic and liturgical. At their best, they make your head feel as if it’s a sky-sized sponge for transcendent tones.
While Cooper Crain initially founded Bitchin Bajas as a solo project, Frye has proven himself a key utility player—the member who can pick up flute, guitar, sax, and synthesizer and add crucial coloration to the band’s expansive creations. (He plays a similar role in Crain’s psych-rock unit Cave.) After a decade of under-the-radar solo recordings, Exoplanet is the first relatively high-profile album under Frye’s own name, and it showcases his grounding in jazz along with his proclivities for field recording and far-flung electronic sound design. Pursuing his interest in birdsong, he has gone so far as to transcribe it, a practice utilized in two pieces here. Frye is also enamored of sounds collected by NASA, which surface in the pivotal song “Jupiter Control.”
With help from Bajas’ Crain and Dan Quinlivan (synths), Nick Ciontea (synths), Ben LaMar Gay (cornet and Wurlitzer), and Tommaso Moretti and Quin Kirchner (drums), Frye sets out to travel the spaceways, madly and dutifully. (Bitchin Bajas covered Sun Ra’s “Angels and Demons at Play” on 2017’s Bajas Fresh, and Frye titled a solo LP Rafractions, to give you an idea of where he’s coming from—and where he’s going.) A woodwinds master, Frye also adds synthesized ingredients to the cauldron his mates stir up. You can hear the way they revel in experimentation on Exoplanet’s “Innercosmos,” a confusion of strange fizzing and burbling that’s akin to the beginning of Tonto’s Expanding Head Band’s “Jetsex,” but not as ominous. By contrast, “Sunset on Jgelu” offers a beatific, synth-dominated denouement.
But such rhythm-free spelunking is not Exoplanet’s only thrust. Opening track “Sunrise on Pruhina” is a spiritual-jazz fanfare that heralds a new, beneficent ritual. Its upswirl of flute, cymbal splash, muted yet ecstatic sax, and restrained drum thunder sets the album’s appropriately exploratory tenor. Similarly, “XC175020” marches purposefully into foreign territory with odd percussion tones somewhere between an unconventionally tuned xylophone and a synthesizer. Perhaps the unusual timbres derive from those aforementioned birds? It’s an avant-jazz trip that sounds simultaneously earthy and otherworldly. So is the rugged jazz peregrination “Lightship Sgr A Star,” with a synth riff that undulates and seethes mesmerizingly in the lower registers. The track comes off like a well-oiled machine that makes you feel both combat-ready and relaxed. Exoplanet abounds in such fascinating paradoxes.
The record’s most far-out track is “Jupiter Control.” Distinguished by an acidic, quasi-TB-303 chord progression and powered by militaristic beats that evoke Mani Neumeier on Zero Set, his groundbreaking 1983 album with Dieter Moebius and Conny Plank, “Jupiter Control” portends a future full of turmoil, triggering thoughts of unprecedented lifeforms. Frye created all of the synth sounds, then had Ciontea feed astronauts’ voices through his modular; finally, he blended in ionosphere emission and space weather electromagnetic pulses sampled from University of Iowa Space Audio. Frye has a long history of mesmerising listeners by means of repetition and unconventional textures. With Exoplanet, he expands his palette—and listeners’ minds.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Astral Spirits | April 22, 2021 | 7.6 | 54b5f246-3b81-44d5-beab-751637962121 | Dave Segal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dave-segal/ | |
Harlem Dipset magnate follows a string of relentless mixtapes and the soul-infused 2004 masterpiece Purple Haze with the soundtrack to a film about a hardscrabble hustler. | Harlem Dipset magnate follows a string of relentless mixtapes and the soul-infused 2004 masterpiece Purple Haze with the soundtrack to a film about a hardscrabble hustler. | Cam’ron: Killa Season | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9012-killa-season/ | Killa Season | In the film Killa Season, Cam'ron plays a thinly veiled avatar named Flea. In fact, the veil is so thin that, toward the end of the movie, characters casually refer to him as Cam, to which he responds without hesitation. Clearly, Flea is Cam's idealized version of himself-- the ultimate hustler, with the gusto to spit on a small child's forehead and shoot a man in the chest while riding a bike. Yet-- in the film and on this accompanying soundtrack-- the rapper's unswerving hardscrabble guise is becoming wearisome. With his first three albums largely devoted to charmingly skewed soft-batch rap & b, the Harlem magnate hardened up by way of relentless mixtape releases, resulting in the soul-infused 2004 masterpiece, Purple Haze. With that album, Cam cannily balanced twisted takes on rote gun'n'drug-running hip-hop tropes with sweet soul samples that gave his countless bon mots levity and bounce. On Killa Season, such levity is sorely missed.
Since Purple Haze, the whole Dipset machine seems to have fallen into a holding pattern. Aside from Juelz Santana, who actually showed some promising progression on two solo mixtapes and an impressive sophomore album last year, Cam and his cronies continue to release a relentless stream of street CDs with diminishing returns. Seemingly, the entire crew is trying to top Haze's signature banger's banger, "Get 'Em Girls", which combines operatic vocals with arch strings and back-broke bass to emit a crippling, avant-garde thump. Thing is, "Get 'Em Girls" can't be topped. Or duplicated. Yet, a large portion of Killa Season is committed to that aim with bumptious tracks like "Girls, Cash, Cars", "War", and the shamelessly-dubbed "Get 'Em Daddy" all puffing lots of hot-air bluster rather than sounding audacious.
The rapper's diminutive Flea moniker also hints at a paranoid inferiority complex that seeps into the record. Instead of showcasing his trademark never-rushed swagger, Killa Season sometimes finds Cam aggravated, yelling flustered barbs over chintzy Casio trumpets and too-busy hi-hats. Exhibit A is "You Gotta Love It", his infamous Jay-Z dis. Out of its original context, the song can now be judged as something other than a crass stunt, and Cam nails some stinging blows while battling the harsh beat (which earns a couple of pity points for sampling, of all things, the score from Basic Instinct). Still, no matter how amped Cam gets over one of Mr. Carter's fashion faux pas, it's always going to look pathetic when an opponent wins a fight by not responding.
When the stiff beats ease up and Cam (slightly) deflates his chest, Killa Season excels. The album's finest moment-- and one of the most intriguing tracks in Cam's catalogue thus far-- is "I.B.S.", an autobiographical tale chronicling the emcee's bout with the pesky, self-explanatory disease called Irritable Bowl Syndrome. Over an uncharacteristically subdued, twinkling beat from Dipset faves Heatmakerz, Cam starts off with the bold pronouncement, "This is a true story." Whether or not that makes the album's other tales less than genuine is unclear-- truth is a highly relative term in Purple City. But he follows up the sincere claim with brilliantly candid couplets, making light of his painful condition. "I can't enjoy a movie dinner," he admits, "My son growin' up, I'm lookin' like the movie Thinner." Whatever "truth" Cam's speaking of here, it's probably something he should rely on more often.
But no matter how oddly hilarious and touching "I.B.S." can be, it's likely to go down as a barefaced anomaly. A more realistic exit strategy for the current banging-head Dipset conundrum is represented by "Do Ya Thing (Remix)", on which Cam shows off a hushed delivery, gliding with easy reticence over a jazzy, Earth, Wind & Fire-sampling Chad Hamilton beat that recalls vintage Pete Rock. Although the rhymes are basically been-there Camlibs, in such smooth surroundings even the mind-numbing hook-- "More killin' killin'/ More killin' killin' for Killa Killa"-- sounds fresh.
On the limited edition version of Killa Season, there's a bonus DVD that includes portions of a press conference Cam held shortly after his Jay-Z dis first aired. The spectacle is ridiculously self-serious, showing that the rapper may be drinking too much of his own Sizzurp liqueur. When asked dead-on if the harsh dig at the best semi-retired rapper alive was a blatant publicity stunt, Cam responds, "I don't need a publicity stunt-- I'm me." If this underwhelming offering is any indication, such blind self-reference has considerably slowed down Cam'ron's once-unstoppable Dipset Movement. | 2006-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2006-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. / Asylum | May 18, 2006 | 6.7 | 54bc48a1-77bd-4ccb-a0a7-24e1dada090b | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The Berlin-based producer swaps his habitually trance-fueled club anthems for an unusual fusion of filmic chamber strings and emotive bass music. | The Berlin-based producer swaps his habitually trance-fueled club anthems for an unusual fusion of filmic chamber strings and emotive bass music. | Nathan Micay: The World I’m Going to Hell For | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nathan-micay-the-world-im-going-to-hell-for/ | The World I’m Going to Hell For | Twitter is full of odd confessions, but the rising dance producer Nathan Micay recently let slip that when he was 19 years old, the first track he ever finished was a bootleg jungle remix of indie-folk hero Sufjan Stevens. The combination of Sufjan Stevens and rollicking Amen breaks sounds ridiculous, but in Micay’s case, perhaps it’s not so surprising. Although he’s best known these days for sidewinding, richly melodic tracks that recall the glory days of trance and progressive house, including last year’s manga-inspired Blue Spring, the Berlin-based Canadian grew up playing banjo, violin, viola, and cello, and was part of a Toronto youth orchestra for many years. More recently, his Schvitz Edits imprint—one of three different record labels he heads up—kicked off its run with club-ready reworks of famed singer-songwriters Dr. John and Gordon Lightfoot.
On The World I’m Going to Hell For, his work has come full circle. Originally issued on a limited-edition cassette late last year, the LP was slated for a proper release this autumn, but once the COVID-19 crisis turned the world upside down, Micay decided to go ahead and put the album online as part of the most recent Bandcamp Friday. Unlike his recent output, The World I’m Going to Hell For almost completely abandons the dancefloor, opting instead for a more cinematic approach that folds in elements of ambient, IDM, and the more emotive corners of bass music.
Two years in the making, most of the album was created using only cello, viola, violin, and a distortion pedal, and that stripped-back approach lends the music both a classical sensibility and widescreen dimensions; only a handful of its 13 tracks feature substantial percussion. It’s still electronic music, but strings are the dominant element, and songs like “Natey, Get on Your Horse,” “For the Hawk of the Millennium Empire,” and “Never Rhythm Game” are the sort of melancholy vignettes that might soundtrack a particularly gut-wrenching scene of a film. More uplifting is “Billing Service,” which includes an unexpected vocal turn from Micay himself; it’s the closest he’s come to having an Arthur Russell moment, although his baritone also brings to mind 69 Love Songs-era Stephin Merritt.
The World I’m Going to Hell For, which Micay describes as his most overtly political effort to date—he calls it a response to the “outdated rhetoric spoken by outdated humans in power”—is meant to build upon the dystopian narrative he laid out with Blue Spring and its accompanying comic. But the closest spiritual analog in Micay’s back catalog is probably Capsule’s Pride, the Akira-themed album he released back in 2016 under the name Bwana. (Arguably the most famous anime of all time, Akira is also a story of rising up against government oppression.) Although Capsule’s Pride is more heavily steeped in club tropes and glossy synths than The World I’m Going to Hell For, the two releases share a filmic sensibility and showcase Micay’s talent for thinking bigger than the dancefloor.
Like all good soundtracks, The World I’m Going to Hell For is best consumed as a whole, but there are some clear highlights. With its gleaming synths and luxurious strings, “Who Shaves the Barber” has a playful pomp that wouldn’t be out of place at a regal garden party, while “If the World’s Still Here on Monday” offsets its brooding swagger with sparkling tendrils of melody. Lush album closer “V” is more subdued, but there’s a sense of majesty in its billowing atmosphere. There’s also something for the DJs: “Panz,” a breezy, twinkling house cut that wouldn’t be out of place on labels like Studio Barnhus or Mule Musiq.
Though the album predates the current pandemic, its reissue now, rushed out months ahead of schedule, gives Micay’s abrupt creative left turn new resonance. In the face of an uncertain future, many artists reflexively retreat to safety or indulge in clichéd tales of impending doom, but Micay has taken a different path. The World I’m Going to Hell For is a serious record, and there are moments of mourning and thoughtful introspection, but the music never falls into despair. It’s a hopeful exercise, and during a time when the whole world feels like it’s falling apart, there’s something uniquely powerful about Micay’s choice to let optimism light the way forward. | 2020-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | LuckyMe | May 26, 2020 | 7.6 | 54bd7cc8-6653-4913-b3ae-e3e75d48e24e | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
The RVNG label compiled this collection from five Sensations' Fix albums, one Franco Falsini solo record, and a series of unreleased outtakes. This work embraces a range of styles, including prog, kosmische musik, trad-rock, ambient, and psychedelia. | The RVNG label compiled this collection from five Sensations' Fix albums, one Franco Falsini solo record, and a series of unreleased outtakes. This work embraces a range of styles, including prog, kosmische musik, trad-rock, ambient, and psychedelia. | Sensations' Fix: Music Is Painting in the Air | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17157-music-is-painting-in-the-air/ | Music Is Painting in the Air | The physical journey traveled by Franco Falsini, founding member of Sensations' Fix, is almost as scattershot as the music he ended up creating. Falsini has called various places home during his career, including his native Italy and London. But his greatest spell of creativity came in a home studio he put together in a basement in Virginia after moving to the United States in 1969. Naturally, that made him something of a trailblazer in the art of home recording, and his fondness for innovation, for exploring curious notions, for defying expectations, extended deeply into the music he made. The word that commonly comes to mind when listening to this work, compiled by RVNG from five Sensations' Fix albums, one Falsini solo record, and a series of unreleased outtakes, is "free." This work embraces a range of styles, including prog, kosmische musik, trad-rock, ambient, and psychedelia.
The open-ended approach Falsini took to his art makes it difficult to easily classify Sensations' Fix, but the disparate nature of his output is also a big part of the appeal. Anyone randomly picking up an album by the band could be transported into one of many worlds. Falsini's 1975 solo album, Cold Nose, was allegedly a soundtrack to a film about cocaine. Excerpts from it are included here, although no tangible evidence of the film's existence is forthcoming. Most of their music is instrumental and heavy on the electronics Falsini was obsessing over at the time, but there are also curios like the vocal-and-guitar driven prog-stodge of "Barnhause Effect" (from Vision's Fugitives) that opens this collection. In 1974, the band's label, Polydor, ended up releasing three Sensations' Fix albums in one year, partly due to the unusual contract Falsini had signed with them. Clearly this is a group that left a delirious trail of orchestrated and accidental confusion in its wake.
That kind of nonsensical approach, bombarding people with myriad stylistic turns over a brief span of time, explains why it's taken so long for listeners to grasp this music. Only after the dust settled did Sensations' Fix get their dues, primarily through DJ Shadow sampling them on The Private Press, but also in a gallery retrospective curated by Sonic Youth, and via Daniel Lopatin dropping a track by the band into a FACT mix. What's striking about Music Is Painting in the Air is how easily you can trace the central aesthetic of many future bands and genres through it. The bass-heavy "Left Side of Green" bears the spidery cadence of post rock; "Dark Side of Religion" is an unnervingly precise proto-Spacemen 3 cut; "Cold Nose Story" acts as a precursor to the fuzzy yearnings of Bristolians Flying Saucer Attack; "Fortune Teller" predates Ben Chasny's astral-folk projections as Six Organs of Admittance by many decades.
It might be a stretch to cast Falsini as some kind of indie rock soothsayer, but it's clear from this collection that he was testing out ground that would later be explored in a great deal of depth. He was never satisfied to run in place, to root the Sensations' Fix sound in one of many areas that was then (and, in some cases, still is now) ripe for exploration. Partly that can be explained by the era in which he was working. Falsini's liner notes explain how he was one of the first musicians to gain access to the MiniMoog, which he describes as "a tool to forward our sound into the future." That Falsini never had a clear idea what his own musical "future" held is both his biggest strength and weakness. A greater exploration of the echo-y loops that make up "Moving Particles" could surely have led to a moment of inspiration not far from Manuel Göttsching's E2-E4. The fact that he didn't get there, choosing many other avenues to explore instead, led him to somewhere incredibly fractured but no less fascinating.
There are no easy inroads into the Sensations' Fix sound-- something this compilation neatly addresses by laying everything out in a self-confessed "arbitrary yet inspired" non-chronological order. The approach to pulling everything together for Music Is Painting in the Air was as anarchic as the spirit in which it was conceived, leading to tracks like "Crossing Berlin", a pulse-heavy Arp odyssey that resembles an offcut from the Midnight Express soundtrack, nestling next to a series of broody electronics in the form of the "Darkside" trilogy from the Finest Finger/Vision's Fugitives era. There were, of course, some peers of this band. Occasionally their work brings to mind the mix of plastic pop, whimsy, electronics, and psychedelia spliced together by the United States of America. Elsewhere, the understated work of krautrock legends Cluster can easily be traced. But this is the world of a singular, often quite nutty talent, who created a puzzle whose secrets may never be fully unlocked. | 2012-10-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-10-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Rvng Intl. | October 5, 2012 | 7.8 | 54c07e1f-c3f6-4280-a458-7965cf878b10 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
On the rangy folk-rock band Big Thief's Saddle Creek debut Masterpiece, the songs sound cherry-picked over a lifetime of writing, the stories carefully compiled. | On the rangy folk-rock band Big Thief's Saddle Creek debut Masterpiece, the songs sound cherry-picked over a lifetime of writing, the stories carefully compiled. | Big Thief: Masterpiece | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21828-masterpiece/ | Masterpiece | Putting aside Mumford and Sons’ attempts to taint the term “folk rock,” there’s no shortage of strong singer-songwriters putting their own spin on the genre these days, from Angel Olsen to Father John Misty to Sharon Van Etten to Kevin Morby. As familiar as it is, music like this can be deceptively tricky to do right; it requires close attention to storytelling and lyrical economy as well as the ability to not completely overpower these words in pursuit of the occasional rock-out. On their debut Masterpiece, Brooklyn’s Big Thief hits the balance with ease and aplomb.
Singer-songwriter Adrianne Lenker pens evocative scenes of people and places, while the band shifts nimbly between lo-fi acoustic and throwback rock hooks, keeping everything noisy and tuneful. They do not reinvent the form and they probably won't be the band to break it, but Lenker has a striking voice and a way with turns of phrase—she is a clear star. She's released albums before—one solo and two proto-Big Thief collections with her main collaborator, guitarist Buck Meek, under the moniker Buck and Anne—but on Masterpiece, the songs sound cherry-picked over a lifetime of writing, the stories carefully compiled.
Masterpiece is a scrapbook of sorts, so it makes sense that the name songs—“Paul,” “Lorraine,” “Randy”—tend to be the strongest. "Paul" twinkles gorgeously through a wistful, dreamy ache of guitars as Lenker recounts a love that could have been if she hadn't been so practical, but "Lorraine" is the kind of scene worth replaying in your mind every night just before dozing off. Atop a lightly strummed acoustic melody, Lenker describes an encounter that under another's less tender eye would seem dirty. But Lenker—seemingly harmonizing with herself—captures the magic of spontaneous attraction, the way some lovers can draw you in through just about anything.
Compared to her stripped-down, pre-Big Thief work—where she sounds quieter, sweeter, slightly twangier at times—Lenker sings with more heft here, prodded by the big sound the band makes when it kicks in behind her. But even when the music veers towards feedback and solos, when it seamlessly shifts tempos and directions on a dime, Lenker’s voice remains the guiding force. On standout "Real Love,” the band alternates between sparse riffs and bright flourishes of guitar reverb as Lenker likens love to all the awful things—a heart attack, domestic abuse, blackened lungs. She connects it to childhood—how your parents' example of love can screw you up—and it’s a heavy realization that manifests into Masterpiece’s rawest bit of feedback.
What doesn’t work as much are the attempts to make Masterpiece feel overly homemade. The brief opening song, “Little Arrow,” is in a decidedly lower fidelity than the rest of the album, which can be charming but in this case detracts from how vivid the full band sounds. At the end of “Interstate," there’s a field recording of a baby repeating the same phrase about liking trucks. These touches to the scrapbook feel like tacked-on reminders of an earlier sound. Listening to Lenker’s early work, where she is definitely more of a folk singer, I’m reminded of a line from Masterpiece’s title track: “There's only so much letting go you can ask someone to do.” | 2016-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | June 6, 2016 | 7.7 | 54c12eab-f7de-4267-b515-e6c4108057a3 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
On her second EP for Mark Ronson’s Zelig Records, the London multi-media artist proves herself a canny, sophisticated pop stylist with a taste for tales of millennial disaffection. | On her second EP for Mark Ronson’s Zelig Records, the London multi-media artist proves herself a canny, sophisticated pop stylist with a taste for tales of millennial disaffection. | Issy Wood: If It’s Any Constellation EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/issy-wood-if-its-any-constellation-ep/ | If It’s Any Constellation EP | In Issy Wood’s paintings, the smallest fragments of a scene can tell an entire life story. In exquisite detail, she catalogues seeming ephemera—the curvature of a snakeskin loafer, for example, or a kitten tchotchke—while leaving the background to melt away. Often painting objects seen in auction catalogues, the 28-year-old Londoner, whose visual art has been shown at Art Basel in Miami and landed her a spot in Forbes’ 30 Under 30, leaves the tragedy of a situation—the death or divorce that might have led such an object to be put up for auction—implicit.
Wood takes the same approach in her music. If It’s Any Constellation, her second EP for Mark Ronson’s Sony imprint Zelig Records and sixth in just two years, is a collection of pop songs that feel tightly cropped: tales of millennial tragedy focussing on just one point of view or one small, striking moment, placed atop arrangements that hint at the bombast of pop but expunge the bells and whistles.
The slight, sardonic products of this outlook are curious: Oddly shaped but undeniably stylish, they present Wood as someone with, at the very least, talent and a unique, appealing sensibility, if not always an impeccable sense for the kind of compositional and lyrical acumen that made her mentor Ronson a star. The five songs that comprise If It’s Any Constellation all seem to teeter on the edge of greatness before retreating. Or, as Wood herself puts it on highlight “Child’s pose”: “I’ve only got one foot in/I keep the other out/I should take that leap but I don’t.”
The best songs on If It’s Any Constellation use tropes of millennial life to convey deep, roiling disaffection. “Child’s pose,” the record’s final track, finds wry comedy in the idea of using yoga to escape trauma, summing up the often banal futility of wellness in one fell swoop: “Thought I knew what I was in for growing up/But now I’m moving to child’s pose,” she sings, elongating the word “pose” into a tumbling “oh-oh-oh” in the middle—like someone trying, and failing, to break into an expressive pop hook. “I’ll hold,” the record’s opener and something of a twin to “Child’s pose,” traverses a similar conceit, likening a breakup to being put on hold by a phone operator, and turning the experience into a squelching anti-betterment anthem: “I’ve made a list of things I need to work at/And every night I find something to add/And now I use it as a welcome mat.” Wood’s vocals are honeyed, inviting, and always multi-tracked, making her best lyrics feel like temptations from the devil on your shoulder; sometimes, she sounds like a more arch, more earthly FKA twigs.
In tone and style, Wood’s clearest contemporary is Norwegian-American satirist Okay Kaya, whose minimalist tales of anxiety and desire conjure a similar feeling of chic malcontent. But where Kaya laces her songs with surprising barbs—references to sexual dysfunction and emotional clumsiness, for example—Wood’s tend to feel smoothed over, a little too neat. As with her press—like an essay in Interview where Wood opines, almost Hannah Horvath-like, on how she “bypassed the ‘struggle’ we’re told musicians are supposed to go through” by being introduced to Ronson—Wood’s music can sometimes feel overthought, and therefore a little chilly. “Muscle,” co-produced by Ronson, gestures at mess (“Tell me I couldn’t make you happy/If I changed everything about me”) but, as it closes, settles for something closer to easily wrought neatness: “I’m worried if I move my face/That it might get stuck that way/Cause under the muscle we’re all the same.”
When If It’s Any Constellation falters, it’s often kept afloat by its primary instruments: the LinnDrum and the Juno-106, tools used to create some of pop’s most indelible moments. Wood has a gestural, fragmented production style—she is fond of foregrounding signifiers of classic pop, such as classic rock power chords, a lilting reggae beat, or the tinny clap of ’80s freestyle, all rendered with period patina by her gear—and, in a Pavlovian way, this gives her music the redolence of tightly made pop, if not quite the memorability. If this EP accomplishes anything, it’s establishing that Wood is a canny, sophisticated stylist—so much so that a lyric like “I’m getting tough/More robust,” from “Muscle,” is a tempting enough promise to keep you excited for next time.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Zelig | June 7, 2021 | 6.4 | 54c727ab-c0fc-4263-90bb-8133bfc811b1 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
This happened once before, at least. It was in Memphis-- not the ancient one nestled on the banks of the ... | This happened once before, at least. It was in Memphis-- not the ancient one nestled on the banks of the ... | William Basinski: The River | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/576-the-river/ | The River | This happened once before, at least. It was in Memphis-- not the ancient one nestled on the banks of the Nile, the one situated along the Mississippi. In the early sixties, before the Beatles landed upon our shores and seeded the hippies. During those years, young kids became interested in the sounds of folk and blues, scarcely realizing that their Negro gardeners and street-sweepers were once prominent Blues recording artists in their own right before the Depression hit. Right under their noses, folks like Furry Lewis played and sang the blues, scant houses down from them.
Fast-forward to late-90s Williamsburg. After scoring increasingly pricey Brian Eno ambient records like Music for Airports and Discreet Music on Bedford Ave., a group of tousle-headed hipsters walk up to look for cheeky furniture at a vintage store called Lady Bird. Little do they realize that the store's proprietor, William Basinski, beyond the daytime gaze of his patrons, spends his nights distilling string signals from the radio waves into loops of melodic ellipses, weaving them back together like Mark Rothko's blanket, suggesting resonant depth far beyond the surface of radio static. It's something that Basinski has been doing in secret for decades, realizing the symphonies behind refrigerator hum, jackhammers, bum mumbles, subway screech, night bleats, and the low volumes of Klaus Schultze records left looping in the loft space, gleaning the aleatoric ambience of such noises and acting as alembic for their salient features. The River, recorded in 1983, marks the first time any of this work has seen wide release: 1998's Shortwave Music was an impossibly rare 12-inch (also on Raster-Noton), and the rest of his discography is a numbered assortment of self-released CD-Rs.
The River washes out your internal clock. Like the opening currents of Can's Future Days, it lulls you into dream-state. Drowned siren songs and dolphin chirps surface, AM symphonies and Muzak backwash swirl around, a reverberating snap crackle 'n' pop coursing over it all as it begins to move. Over the hour and a half of spectral waves, the tides heave heavenwards and back. Try as I can to hold on, there are no markers to indicate how far I've sunk into the music. If one image that continually loops through my mind as I drift, it is of an enormous ballet of ghostly zeppelins in the midnight sky, filled with careening ball lightning, hovering over the surface of the ocean, its ripples of water swollen with whale songs, rising and falling in a grand, gargantuan gesture.
In terms of psychoactive aural properties, the echoing freefall and slowly evolving twirls of bliss-smoke are reminiscent of another two-disc drop through Nirvana, that of the Taj Mahal Travelers' August 1974. But the emotional undertow here could only match fathoms with a minimalist classic like Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic. But The River is without context, an Alka-Seltzer commercial for transubstantiated Body of Christ tabs, peregrinating as they descend to the bottom of the Dead Sea's drinking glass, captured in slow-motion by structuralist filmmaker Michael Snow.
Though it's taken twenty years for these waves to reach 21st century shores, they don't show many wrinkles. In fact, The River is so far ahead of its time that in hindsight, it could only have made sense this far downstream, after the ambitious radio documentation of fringe noises such as the Conet Project's "numbers transmissions" and the noises incorporated into two of last year's more aurally exciting pop releases, Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and the Trail of Dead's Source Tags and Codes (both integrated the sounds of shortwave radios, albeit only to make their guitar songs a bit weirder). It's a final justice that these clippings so mysteriously divined from the heavens can exist on their own infinite plane. | 2003-05-20T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2003-05-20T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Raster-Noton | May 20, 2003 | 8.8 | 54ceee10-db09-48b5-9a52-89c8a9fe91b4 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The young jazz singer’s live double album showcases the gravitas, humor, and modernity she brings both to classic standards and her own compositions. | The young jazz singer’s live double album showcases the gravitas, humor, and modernity she brings both to classic standards and her own compositions. | Cécile McLorin Salvant: Dreams and Daggers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cecile-mclorin-salvant-dreams-and-daggers/ | Dreams and Daggers | At just 28, jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant has already been lauded by the music industry, including its figurehead Wynton Marsalis, who said that a singer of her caliber only comes by “once in a generation or two.” To be positioned among the ranks of Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell, and Nina Simone—artists who place greater emphasis on telling a story that is universal over technical skill or prowess—takes gravitas, having a sharp wit about her and an old soul. Judging from the complex range and emotional heft that Salvant delivers on Dreams and Daggers, she has lives of experience already under her belt.
As a singer and composer, Salvant has always been comfortably nestled between a bygone era and the present day. This plays well to her strengths on her new double live album as she reimagines the work of Loesser, Rodgers, and Hart for today’s audiences. Salvant returns us to “simpler” times, when just a singer and her acoustic band could command no less than your full and undivided attention and, more importantly, when there were lyrics that implored you to utilize all of your senses in order to feel no less than the gamut of human emotion.
With a Best Jazz Vocal Grammy already on her mantle for her third album, 2015’s For One to Love, the Miami-born French-Haitian singer returns to us a little wiser, taking a deeper dive into the material she’s become known for. It is by far the boldest move of her career, one that pays off handsomely. On Dreams and Daggers, Salvant combines the well-known standards she’s already cut her teeth on (notably, her breakout version of the 1939 classic “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was”) with new original songs that explore love in all of its murkiness and splendor. It marks the coming of age for an assured young woman and artist who cradles every song with nurturing hands, full of caution and warmth.
“You’re My Thrill” pinpoints the moment when love is at its most abundant, as suggested by the bountiful spread of fish, assorted vegetables and exotic fruits laid out before us in the track’s accompanying video. Salvant’s delicate phrasing reveals her penchant for drama on the 1933 standard. Though evocative of the version made famous by Billie Holiday, it is still rooted in the present, thanks in part to its revamped, tension-filled string arrangement, courtesy of bassist Paul Sikivie. Her clever reworking of Nöel Coward’s “Mad About the Boy” also reveals her talent for reinterpretation, the way that she fully embraces a standard, like wearing the clothes of an old lover. As pianist Aaron Diehl lurks about, establishing the dark mood with a spare refrain, the ominous tone becomes wonderfully juxtaposed against Coward’s song of infatuation. Salvant takes full advantage of that fact as she rather unexpectedly, and angrily, belts out “Mad! It’s pretty funny... but I’m mad,” forewarning us all on how often infatuation can border on insanity and obsession.
Incorporating the blues into her live repertoire, especially one that consists mainly of standards, shows off Salvant’s expansive musical pedigree while paying homage to the earliest known feminists who unapologetically sang of love’s many trials and tribulations. On “Sam Jones’ Blues,” in the span of three-minutes, Salvant unleashes her “alter ego,” one who is brazen and revels in the bawdiness of the little known Bessie Smith tune: “You ain’t talkin’ to Mrs. Jones/You speakin’ to Miss Wilson now!” Though it marks a distinct departure from her pointed yet articulate and intimate phrasing, on the live album, Salvant wisely forgoes complete emulation. Instead, she finds deeper meaning, playing with the candor and suggestiveness of the music of Smith and Ida Cox, tapping into yet another facet of her vast range and personality as a vocalist.
Recorded live at New York’s renowned Village Vanguard just a year ago with her bandmates Diehl, Sikivie and drummer Lawrence Leathers, Salvant also incorporates new original music on the set. To juxtapose newer compositions against what many consider to be part of the Great American Songbook is indeed a high-wire act, especially when jazz standards continue to outsell newer works. But given our current climate, thankfully, we are now seeing a resurgence in artists who are pushing the boundaries of how jazz can evolve and still have great relevance in the 21st century. On songs like “More” and “The Worm,” Salvant asserts her own thoughts on love (“Do you love me? Do you think I’m pretty?”) not as an authority on the subject, but rather ensuring that her opinions are valid and are part of the ongoing conversation.
Much of how we operate today encourages that we further desensitize and distance ourselves from anything (and anyone) that can potentially disappoint or hurt us. But where does it end? That’s perhaps one of chief questions raised by this ambitious effort—how can our humanity continue to thrive and flourish without love? As she reimagines the through line of modern-day romance and heartache in jazz, Salvant is at her most versatile and expressive on Dreams and Daggers, choosing songs that wholly capture and embrace the full spectrum that is love—from the initial yearning to the relentless ache and betrayal. | 2017-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Mack Avenue | October 7, 2017 | 7.6 | 54e8435a-10e5-454d-b0cb-13a582925705 | Shannon J. Effinger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shannon-j. effinger/ | |
The producer Roman Flügel has spread his work across genres and a number of aliases, and on Verschiebung he explores misty, muted techno. | The producer Roman Flügel has spread his work across genres and a number of aliases, and on Verschiebung he explores misty, muted techno. | Roman Flügel: Verschiebung | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22208-verschiebung/ | Verschiebung | Deep house, by definition, puts a premium on emotion, but even by those standards, Roman Flügel is an uncommonly expressive producer. His “How to Spread Lies,” from 2010, remains one of this decade's most effective pairings of melancholy moods and dance-floor kinetics; so is 2010’s “Brian Le Bon,” which borrows a musical phrase from Duran Duran’s “Save a Prayer,” of all things. Even when his more playful instincts take the lead—see, for instance, the tumbling arpeggios and dizzying percussive interplay of “Brasil,” or the blurry electro of “Cookie Dust,” which swerves like a spinning top—there’s a wistful undercurrent that sets him apart from less sensitive producers.
Given the consistency of both his quality control and his emotional register, it can be easy to forget that Flügel is also one of house and techno’s most versatile musicians. In the ’90s, he spread his stylistic interests across a wide array of aliases—Eight Miles High, Soylent Green, Roman IV—along with his duo Alter Ego, with Jörn Elling Wuttke, and its various, well, alter egos (Acid Jesus, Holy Garage, Sensorama, et al). Deep house, acid, Frankfurt trance, and minimal techno have all figured in his playbook; with “Geht’s Noch?” and Alter Ego’s “Rocker,” he even added a bullet point for big, dumb rave anthems to his resume.
His new EP for the Die Orakel label finds him continuing to break new stylistic ground—and working at the far extreme of his more misty-eyed house productions. Verschiebung is inscrutable, austere, and single-minded in its focus. The title is a German word that translates, depending upon the context, as “displacement,” “deferral,” “movement,” “shift,” or “drift,” and the music follows suit. What appear, at first, to be four smooth, muted takes on reductionist techno, with sonar pings skipping across the top of pitter-pat drum patterns, prove, upon closer inspection, to be far thornier constructions. Ostensibly repetitive patterns short circuit again and again, and looped phrases break and scatter into fragments. Yet, unlike someone like Autechre, say, it still preserves the illusion of frictionless forward glide.
The four untitled tracks here are all variations upon a small, tightly controlled set of sounds—scratchy little hi-hats, rimshots, and tuned toms, overlaid with uneven bleeps evoking open car doors, or trucks backing up. There are no melodies, just stuttering patterns of queasily pitch-bent pings; minor keys predominate. It’s all resolutely analog, suggesting the sound of electricity pushing itself through wires—not so much dance music as impedance music. The most important element is the one you don't actually hear: the 16-step sequencer, or possibly sequencers, with which Flügel is controlling all his sounds. These are the machines that give his music is rippling sense of instability: By running patterns of different lengths against each other, and constantly manipulating his loops in real time, he turns out a softly tangled mess of sounds that just begs to be unraveled—yet switches up as soon as you've begun to tease out the specifics.
Where most house and techno rarely let go of the four-to-the-floor handrail, these cuts drift freely atop the steady pulse, with strange time signatures and dub delay stretching the rhythmic grid until it begins to warp. “Verschiebung 1” comes closest to the steady groove of minimal techno, but trying to parse its elements is a nonstarter, and will quickly prove as easy as compiling a grocery list while stoned. On “Verschiebung 2,” triplets hammer against a beat counted off in intervals of seven; on “Verschiebung 3,” glassy pings pile up like colliding rings on the surface of a rain-spattered lake. The drum-free “Verschiebung 4,” the record’s most austere cut, clangs like something hammering on the hull of a submarine. Listeners looking for emotional payoff may be put off by the coldness of these tracks, but you can’t help but marvel at their focus. It’s a comparatively minor work for Flügel, but even marking time to a broken metronome, he stirs a powerful sense of unease. | 2016-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Die Orakel | August 11, 2016 | 6.8 | 54ec7021-e217-4b6b-ac7a-446d7c5c9db2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The latest from this Brooklyn art-noise band continues their analytical zeal while also expanding a more realized sound. | The latest from this Brooklyn art-noise band continues their analytical zeal while also expanding a more realized sound. | Black Dice: Repo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12907-repo/ | Repo | It's still a stretch to talk about Black Dice as a formalist collective, but the Brooklyn band's migration from loose noise to something more structured counts as one of the most intriguing narratives in the art-rock underground. In the beginning, around the turn of 2000, Black Dice became notorious for playing antagonistic post-hardcore punk shows in dramatically darkened rooms. It was a badge of honor to have gotten hurt, or at least certifiably scared, during one of their lashing affairs, which rated as physical ordeals as much as aural experiences.
Then, starting with their 2002 DFA album Beaches and Canyons, Black Dice repositioned themselves as an unusually gritty kind of ambient band. They took to standing stock-still behind tables of sequencers and effects, with occasional drumming the only thing to count as even remotely gestural. The change to stand-around gear happened around the same time as that of their compatriots in Animal Collective, but Black Dice's shift signified something different: hermetic, internal systems-like ideas, as opposed to Animal Collective's more external, ecstatic musings.
Four albums and lots of heady grinding later, Repo draws on that same analytical zeal while also expanding a sound that's increasingly more realized and strategic. With its steady forward movement and messy pointillist pillars thrown up where concise beats might be, the opening "Nite Crème" marks Black Dice's slow, lurching move towards something like techno. It wouldn't tear up any Berlin warehouse, to be sure, but thinking about techno proves useful to Repo: Where lots of techno artists have moved away from austere formalism toward more liberated outbursts of noise (see Ricardo Villalobos, Audion, any producer who treats where beats fall as a means more than an end), Black Dice, as a band, have effectively moved in the opposite direction, toward a richly murky meeting ground somewhere in the middle.
Much of Repo makes good on that same sort of bottom-up drift toward cohesion, whether rhythmic or not. "Glazin" plays similar sleight-of-hand with the calm pulse of reggae: As a sampled guitar clip gets infested with all kinds of anxiously granulated textures and whirs, a warm bass-line starts to roll contentedly beneath it. In "Earnings Plus Interest", a sampled drum break that could be sourced from 1980s hip-hop or 90s big-beat starts out splashy but then turns stoic, as clutches of noise crash all around it.
Those patented Black Dice clutches of noise sound more specifically placed on Repo than they did on 2007's Load Blown, an album that seemed to prioritize textural smear more than simple rhythm or spacing. Repo is still abstract in a similar and smeary way, but it sounds like Black Dice have gotten a better handle on their gear-- as if, having learned how to make more and more different noises on more and more different machines, part of their project has turned more toward what exactly to do with those noises. In those terms, highlights like "La Cucaracha" and "Lazy TV"-- with coolly stuttering use of a delay-glitch as quasi-African guitar and lots of warped DJ Screw drama, respectively-- qualify as compositions, however decomposed they prove. | 2009-04-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-04-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Paw Tracks | April 9, 2009 | 7.1 | 54ece6cb-1f7b-4e77-8224-170105ba4a7a | Andy Battaglia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-battaglia/ | null |
Beyond its tabloid drama, the innovation of Destiny’s Child’s second album codified the sound of R&B at the turn of the millennium. It is stilletto-sharp, and laid the groundwork for Beyoncé’s career. | Beyond its tabloid drama, the innovation of Destiny’s Child’s second album codified the sound of R&B at the turn of the millennium. It is stilletto-sharp, and laid the groundwork for Beyoncé’s career. | Destiny’s Child: The Writing’s on the Wall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/destinys-child-the-writings-on-the-wall/ | The Writing’s on the Wall | In the music video for “Flawless,” Beyoncé splices in a clip of her on “Star Search” as a child with Girls Tyme, the group that would later become Destiny’s Child. What’s remarkable about the clip isn’t that Beyoncé has it—she keeps an archive of virtually every recorded moment of her life, temperature-controlled and cordoned off like a business data center—but that Girls Tyme lost to a folk-rock group that sounds like the midpoint of Sophie B. Hawkins and Michael Bolton.
There is no better microcosm of what happened to Top 40 music between 1993 and 1999 than this. Bands like the “Star Search” winner were buried in a landfill of post-grunge, while R&B groups built out from soul and quiet storm to create a sound innovative enough to earn the “futuristic” label almost everything got in that pre-Y2K time. This bore itself out in the revival in the early-to-mid-’90s of excellent girl groups vaguely in the Supremes mold—TLC, En Vogue, SWV—but it would be Destiny’s Child who would become their true successors.
The Writing’s on the Wall, one of the best-selling R&B albums of all time, is perhaps most known for what was going on behind the scenes. In spring of 2000, founding members LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson fired, through an attorney, Mathew Knowles, the group’s replacement for late manager Andretta Tillman and, more importantly, Beyoncé’s father. They alleged that Mathew Knowles kept too much of the group’s profits and that the group’s attention was disproportionately allocated in favor of Kelly Rowland and Beyoncé, increasingly featured both as lead singer and in promo. “Ninety percent of the vocals you're hearing is Beyoncé and Kelly,” Mathew Knowles rebutted in the Houston Chronicle, “but they all got paid the same.”
But the two only expected a change in management, perhaps mediation, until the video for “Say My Name” came out and Luckett and Roberson saw, for the first time, their replacements: Michelle Williams, a former backup singer for Monica, and Farrah Franklin, a dancer from the “Bills, Bills, Bills” video. That Joseph Kahn-directed clip, four minutes of posing in color-coordinated rooms, became one of the defining “TRL”-era music video trends—in the past year alone it’s gotten at least two homages in Kehlani’s “Distraction” and Tove Styrke’s otherwise unrelated “Say My Name.” But it was a product of necessity—Luckett and Roberson were dismissed so quickly that there wasn’t time for the two newcomers to learn much choreography.
The ensuing years of lawsuits, accusations, and characteristically Southern bless-her-hearts didn’t hinder the group’s sales—The Writing’s on the Wall still “sold nine million,” as Knowles said on the title track of their follow-up Survivor—but dominated both the tabloids and the more respectable outlets so thoroughly that Beyoncé, Rowland, and Williams would spend the next eighteen years smoothing it over and eventually rolling it into their own narratives. The name of the album is the first of what would be Beyoncé’s many rebuttals to the press one too many commentators joked about how compared the group’s ever-shrinking lineup to the reality show of the same name.
By most accounts, The Writing’s on the Wall was the moment the members of Destiny’s Child took much-needed creative control. The group’s childhood stint on “Star Search” made an R&B career seem achievable, but the path to achieving it involved years of grueling artist development in the girls’ teens with training “boot camps” each summer: strict daily regimens of jogging, voice and dance lessons, often at once, constant rehearsing, tears. “We weren’t allowed to leave the house except to go jogging,” Roberson recalled. “We had to watch old videos of people like the Supremes and the Jackson 5.” Indeed, Joe Jackson was a role model to Mathew Knowles, for better and worse, and his actions figured into Luckett and Roberson’s lawsuit. When Destiny’s Child’s debut came out on Columbia, they were still in their teens, and it too was the product of a lot of behind-the-scenes hustling—a failed partnership with Elektra Records, a lot of producers and directors tried out and dismissed.
The result was something of a baby neo-soul album that even Beyoncé admitted was an awkward fit for the then-teens. The Writing’s on the Wall, by contrast, was recorded quickly, in about three weeks, and feels like it. Everyone sounds hungry, everyone has new ideas. You can tell from the intro alone: a Godfather-inspired sitdown, steeped in drama with a take of Spanish guitar from Andy Williams’ “Speak Softly, Love” and kept there by the four women styling themselves as Mafia dons—the capo di tutto capi played by, naturally, “Beyoncé Corleone, from the Southwest.” What seemed silly at the time coming from a barely established girl group makes more sense decades of concept albums and a world domination later.
Many of these new ideas came from of the album’s new production duo: songwriter Kandi Burruss, formerly of Xscape, and producer Kevin “She’skpere” Briggs, both fresh off a breakthrough smash, TLC’s “No Scrubs.” Originally brought in for just one track, Burruss and Briggs not only ended up with five tracks but crafted its most recognizable sound: guitar riffs chiseled to a point like stiletto heels, hitting in precisely choreographed time; knotty percussion arrangements, record scratches, bubbles and breaking glass arranged into a dense mesh; orchestral brass draped in the background like plush curtains; vocals wound in and around like scrollwork.
Along with Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, who reprises the thick, paranoid mix of “The Boy Is Mine” for “Say My Name,” Briggs and Burruss craft a singular style that, compared to the minimalist arrangements of today, is downright rococo. At least one early mix of “Say My Name” was tossed out by the group for being too crowded and fussy, a sentiment most reviewers at the time echoed. Now, it’s fascinating to hear, a sonic Rube Goldberg machine. Even the simpler tracks were relentless and intimidating, like the instrumental to “Bug a Boo,” mostly just a looped Toto sample. The group was baffled with what they’d even do with it. “At the time people weren’t really singing over those types of tracks,” Burruss said. “You’d look at it as something they’d rap over.”
Rapping was no problem for Destiny’s Child; their early “Star Search” incarnation was as singer-rappers, with emphasis on the latter. Their grown-up adaptation of rap—melodic R&B delivered in soon-to-be-trademark staccato vocals—had a soft launch in the group’s breakout hit, “No, No, No (Pt. 2),” encouraged by collaborator Wyclef Jean. And of course in the R&B waters at the time was the undeniable influence of Timbaland, most notably 1998’s destined-for-the-canon Aaliyah track “Are You That Somebody.” Curiously, Timbaland and Destiny’s Child’s paths barely crossed. Tim produced their inessential soundtrack cut “Get on the Bus,” proving the two artists had an inexplicably poor fit. Missy Elliott produced one track on The Writing’s on the Wall as a surrogate, there’s a gag reference to “No, No No” on Timbaland’s Jay Z collaboration “Lobster and Scrimp,” but that’s about it.
Timbaland’s influence was felt nevertheless. In 2000, the Village Voice called The Writing’s on the Wall “...the Aaliyah album Aaliyah didn’t make.” While there are hints of Aaliyah’s shyer, more stylized vocals on The Writing’s on the Wall, particularly in Luckett’s feathery soprano harmonies, a more typical Destiny’s Child vocal is brassier, more conversational, virtuosic in a sneakier way. The verses of “Say My Name,” ricocheting from double-time to triple and back, are as technically skilled as any number of acclaimed rappers but never obvious about it. (Like any No. 1 hit, “Say My Name” has been endlessly covered, but there’s a reason most people stick to the chorus or slow it down to languid, unchallenging speeds.) “That staccato, fast singing has kind of become the sound of R&B. It’s still here in 2006,” Knowles told The Guardian. It’s still here in 2017, too; examples are too abundant to list, but the reigning king is Drake on almost anything—including, on “Girls Love Beyoncé,” his own ersatz Destiny’s Child song.
The Writing’s on the Wall is presented with a loose religious theme—each track is introduced in the form of a Commandment, and the album ends with a prayer: “Amazing Grace,” dedicated to late manager Andretta Tillman. Specifically, its theme is confession: a catalog of relationships and the failings thereof. This was, and is, fraught territory. Practically since the album’s release, Destiny’s Child have dodged accusations of man-hating. Beyoncé stood in front of that giant FEMINIST display at the VMAs not as a response to a couple of thinkpieces but to over a decade of misinterpretations of her work, starting here. Forget the dated technological references in “Bug a Boo,” its hapless-clinger archetype has stalked his way from pagers to cell phones to today’s social media. “Bills, Bills, Bills” was so vastly misunderstood the group had to patiently re-explain it in almost every interview. This particular scrub isn’t just broke, but a brokeness vortex; he drains her girlfriend’s gas tank, maxes out her credit cards and ruins her credit. Maybe it’s a testament to the comparatively flush 1999 economy that this almost sounds quaint. (The lady he’s running up her bills with? His mama.)
Beyoncé, in particular, would develop this theme at length throughout her career: money as a weapon, wielded by and against women. It’s the last straw of “Hey Ladies”: “The worst thing of it all was that he gave her money/Now, how he gonna give her my ends?/That’s a no-no.” And it’s one of the many indiscretions on “Confessions”: “Remember that time you wondered where your money went?” The bridge professes contrition, but Missy’s track suggests the lie; the sweet-seeming guitar line curdles within seconds, dropping out ever so often to punctuate lines. The track is a game of confession chicken with Beyoncé delivering, in carefully measured detail, “He kissed me like a guy could never kiss a girl before.” These aren’t the words of someone who's sorry, at least not just sorry. Confessional music in the ’90s is often thought of as the work of gamine singer-songwriters. But The Writing’s on the Wall, along with TLC’s CrazySexyCool, are the template for the 1990s’ other strain of confessional music—it’s right there in the title—and the one that’s survived most into 2017.
Destiny’s Child were still in their teens when The Writing’s on the Wall was recorded, so it’s natural for them to still try on styles. But while its pop and R&B sections are distinct, they’re equally assured. On the pop side, there’s “Jumpin’ Jumpin,” Beyoncé’s only production credit on the album and a test run of sorts for her solo singles: most obviously “Single Ladies,” but also the constant escalation seen on cuts like “Love on Top.” The R&B tracks, meanwhile, root Destiny’s Child in history, a fact unfortunately downplayed by the public once the girl group became the girl group of its era. The coy, pillowy “Temptation,” and the wistfully romantic “If You Leave” present a dyad of unconsummated, nuanced yearning, directly to the feelings. The former is produced by D’Wayne Wiggins of Tony! Toni! Toné! and the latter a duet with Next, both of whom provide gravitas beyond mere filler. “Sweet Sixteen” was originally recorded as “16” by Jody Watley of Shalamar for her album Flower; besides a rawer lead vocal by LaTavia, the track is left reverently unchanged. It’s undeniably compelling but a clear outlier—a nod to legacy by an act on the cusp of creating its own.
In a way, The Writing’s on the Wall is a victim of its own success. The album was released to muted critical response, was not nominated for an Album of the Year Grammy (unusual for one with its sales) and was, Beyoncé recalled, something of a hard sell. “You have to remember at that time that we'd talk to people at the record company and they'd say, ‘Look, they don't even play R&B in Europe right now,’” she told The Guardian. It’s now been so subsumed into the sound of pop and R&B the 2000s, not to mention into each alumna’s solo work, that the original no longer sounds surprising. But it’s important to remember that the sound of 1999, as actually experienced in 1999, was rather dismal: a chintzy early Max Martin sound that Max Martin would abandon almost immediately, goofy soft-rock, a watered-down facsimile of a “Latin invasion”—and R&B, eclipsing the rest in innovation.
Since the beginning of popular music, pop and rock have routinely borrowed—or stolen—R&B’s tricks, and conditions in 1999 were particularly ripe for this kind of crossover. The industry had money, which always helps. And unlike today, with Top 40 and urban radio playlists so siloed that a track like “Bad and Boujee” can reach No. 1 and still have pop radio barely touch it, Destiny’s Child could routinely top all the major charts. They could enter one millennium opening for Dru Hill and enter the next one touring with TLC and Christina Aguilera. And echoing the Supremes, they could firmly plant themselves atop the lineage of girl groups, while codifying the sound and subject of popular music for the foreseeable future. | 2017-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | June 18, 2017 | 9 | 54f29c2f-1af3-470b-9272-e840cb0d37c8 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
The Missouri-born Chicago psych folk musician and Will Oldham collaborator's magnificent second album is powered by her extraordinary voice, elegant strokes of wordplay, and a thoughtful, never morbid belief in the finality of death. | The Missouri-born Chicago psych folk musician and Will Oldham collaborator's magnificent second album is powered by her extraordinary voice, elegant strokes of wordplay, and a thoughtful, never morbid belief in the finality of death. | Angel Olsen: Half Way Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17154-half-way-home/ | Half Way Home | On the last day of November 2010, Bonnie "Prince" Billy played an unannounced, mystifying show with "the Babblers" as his backing band-- made no less odd by the fact that the band was seemingly wearing fleece pajamas. Website Chattarati reported that, among songs that sounded more traditionally Oldham-like, there was also "charged-up punk that featured Angela Babbler screaming down the throats of the front row." It turned out that Angela Babbler, whose voice was described as "blood-curdling" by another site, was actually the Missouri-born, Chicago-based singer Angel Olsen, and that the "charged-up punk" was a cover of Kevin Coyne and Dagmar Krause's "Sweetheart", from their 1979 album Babble-- an old favorite of Oldham's.
Since then, Olsen has formed part of the Cairo Gang that performed on Bonnie "Prince" Billy's recent records, and she's toured with them too-- though her extraordinary voice has set her miles above the backing-band parapet. Halfway through Wolfroy Goes to Town's "Time to be Clear", she breaks through the welcoming lull with a wordless melody as casual but striking as a ditty that Edith Piaf might have hummed whilst hanging out the washing. Trade "blood-curdling" for "blood-chilling"-- she doesn't sound of this world. "When something like that happens, I don't know how to feel," Oldham said of Olsen's improvised warble, in a Pitchfork interview. "It's almost like I get hollowed out and then filled, but I don't know what it's with. It's a mixture of apprehension and satisfaction at the same time."
Olsen's voice is possessed of an intensely dramatic range; one minute she's barely singing-- more a downcast, near-spoken tumble of words-- but the next, she's a tragic heroine of the Weimar cabaret, tremendously poised but letting emotion rag her throat as if a freight train were passing through. Hers is not a voice made for modern laptop speakers. Its chalky squeak will earn lazy comparisons to Joanna Newsom; really, her palette is a mixture of the great, lost singer Connie Converse, Jason Molina's old-timey drama, Bill Callahan's terrific and unsettling ability to shift between dourness and comfort, and Nina Nastasia's graceful lope. Olsen's voice is extraordinary and unequivocal, which makes the way she uses it to sing of the most profound doubts on the follow-up to 2010's initially cassette-only Strange Cacti even more affecting.
In a recent interview, Olsen talked about how she was born into a big family, but was eventually adopted, crediting her uncle and biological mother as being "a huge part" of why she plays music. She hasn't told the story of her adoption beyond that, aside from that she was given a keyboard as a parting gift before leaving her birth family. "You can imagine why I became attached to it," she said. That instrument barely figures on Half Way Home, which is mostly made up of stitches of acoustic guitar gathered into a loose but regular weave, soft double bass, and the odd patch of stark, rudimentary drumming. You get the impression that Olsen would find using the keyboard in her solo material too literal, too personal; she's spoken of her concern that there's often "too much self" in songs, and there's only one here that's set in any kind of concrete scenario rather than on a psychological stage.
Sliding in with mournful electric guitar, "Lonely Universe" concerns the loss of a mother figure at a time when "I was only a child, about to lose my child-like mind." Her brothers and sisters can't help; the ambulance comes anyway, leaving Olsen dressing for school, floating as "a lonely universe." It's a heartbreaking acoustic-and-brushes sway, where her vocals, at their most dramatic, call to mind a tender Elvis, or convey the affect of a piece like Gavin Bryars' "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet". It's also a canvas for Olsen's most elegant strokes of wordplay: She sings about the departing "sweet mother earth" as if she had been a lover-- "the way you touched my hands like you never had before," "You won't always understand when you've truly loved someone until after they've gone." (The previous song, the slow and spare "Safe in the Womb", talks of motherly comfort, and the protection offered by states outside of being alive; pre-life, after-life, mental purgatory.) Lyrical statements are proffered and then cut poignantly; towards the song's end, she wryly refers to the loss of her childlike innocence in more general terms: "Well, losing your mind, it ain't half as bad as it seems." Double-take, and and the devastation builds up. You can't blame her for the doubt that sets in-- "time to give up that unforgiving act of altogether-ness." Go for broke, be selfish, abandon connections, community, and family, because what good did they do you anyway?
Olsen knows betrayal like the best of them: On "Miranda", she's a sheriff reading someone their rights, though the soft Emmylou Harris hurt and creak of her voice when she sings, "I love you dear, but it's not up to me/ And it's never quite been, you see," suggest that the guilty party's transgressions are emotional rather than legal. "Some of the things that you've said in my ear/ As you open a door and casually smile.../ How I have wanted to scream out/ All of the things that entered my mind," goes the end, in the record's only instance of her being driven to speak her many thoughts aloud.
Belief and the futility thereof scar Half Way Home's glowing skin. "Always Half Strange" sounds like a curio recovered from turn-of-the century Europe, that casual, romantic drama filling Olsen's voice again as she fingerpicks gently. It finds her in a state that preoccupies her throughout the record-- "half life and half dream, and half crazy to believe in anything it all." She hides out in her mind, working out the value and meaning of things and people, and often judges her own worth by how much she weighs on another's mind. ("Oh, to be that distant thought/ Some growing memory/ In your mind," goes "Acrobat".) Here, things exist only if you believe in them, and it's easy to see how the precariousness of that idealism might leave you feeling a tad shaky: On the ominous, classical "The Sky Opened Up", Olsen ascends to a gap in the heavens, and returns to "see things just as they are"-- "appalled at what I had found." Whatever she sees up there imparts the distressing truth that, "If you dare to be true to what you believe/ There's always somebody to lose."
It's no coincidence that Olsen receives this damning truth from a place beyond life: One belief she sustains across the album is in the finality of death. The great beyond strikes fear into many, but for Olsen, at least it puts a cap on the uncertainty of living. What's striking is that her ruminations on the subject are never morbid or even particularly sad. "If only we could understand each other, I'd happily die," she sings on "Can't Wait Until Tomorrow", one of the album's only slightly weaker tracks; rawer, even, than anything on Strange Cacti. "I thought this time last year, I'd be dead," she recalls on the conversational, largely plainspoken "You Are Song", as if recalling a more casual expectation-- improving at French, or learning to bake bread.
For anyone starting to worry for Olsen's emotional health, there are patches of warm, inviting firelight away from Half Way Home's darker corners. The certainty of her feelings in the opening song, the waltzing "Acrobat"-- "I love the way your body's made/ I love the way your voice is sex"-- revives Olsen, who had assumed herself to be dead, her voice cracking with a renewed burst, almost Antony-like in rapture. And there's a tremendous, near-girlish and flirtatious feel to "The Waiting", which also proves the greatest employ of her slight backing band; electric guitar as sharp as wires bursting from fixtures, a soft male chorus, that conversational, cantering double bass. Dreamy and wry at the prospect of being swept off one's feet, it could nearly be a modern interpretation of "Fools Rush In" from the woman's perspective-- and there's something about it that calls for a male vocal to duet with Olsen, though the fact that she shirks the obvious speaks volumes about her distance from trad country tropes. And on the flippy, festive "Free", she takes incremental steps towards infatuation: "Sometimes I have to take you in my arms/ Press your heart against my heart, oh!/ You know, each day it means a little more." Come the end, she's a congregational rogue, breaking ranks to exclaim that she "can only reach him in my mind" in the kind of voice that makes skirts billow, surprised.
What makes Half Way Home magnificent is its openness to what could be, to potential. Yes, we're all going to die in the end, and you can get there by casting off all belief and going it alone, or gathering moss and weighing heavier, leaving a mark, going the distance with company. It's the battle between the internal and external, the transference of intention to what's really conveyed; the tug of war between wanting to be something to someone and offering them yourself in return, while keeping something for self-protection. It's a very open record about what goes on behind a staunch emotional guard; what Will Oldham said about that "mixture of apprehension and satisfaction at the same time" rings completely true. That battle and potential is best summed up in a line from the closing song: "It's known that the tiniest seed is both simple and wild." | 2012-09-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-09-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Bathetic | September 12, 2012 | 8 | 54f4794f-e4b2-4dad-a34a-bfbb37b71483 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Black Lips are a go-to band for vintage lo-fi freaks, and their raucous live shows have helped them cross over outside of crusty dive bars. Good Bad Not Evil, however, is the record where naysayers, disinterested friends and aquaintances, people on the street, and anyone else within earshot has to sit up, shut up, and listen. | Black Lips are a go-to band for vintage lo-fi freaks, and their raucous live shows have helped them cross over outside of crusty dive bars. Good Bad Not Evil, however, is the record where naysayers, disinterested friends and aquaintances, people on the street, and anyone else within earshot has to sit up, shut up, and listen. | Black Lips: Good Bad Not Evil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10626-good-bad-not-evil/ | Good Bad Not Evil | Black Lips can, to date, be depended on for raucousness, irresponsibility, occasionally pissing in their own mouths onstage, and sloppy garage tunes indebted to noise and punk as much as the band's Southern roots. Given all that, the idea of them hitting anything outside of a niche audience seemed slim. They're a go-to band for filth-rock puritans, even as their unhinged live shows have helped them slowly gain a larger audience with each album's release.
Good Bad Not Evil, however, is the record where naysayers, disinterested friends and acquaintances, and anyone else within earshot has to sit up, shut up, and listen. The "garage rock" tag will perpetually follow this band, and while I'm not saying it isn't sometimes apt, there's a difference between being a revival act and seeming blissfully out of time. Black Lips' idea of being topical is writing a jilted love song to a girl named Katrina from New Orleans, and their idea of diversity is writing a country song about breaking a death to children (and sounding terribly inconvenienced by doing so). It's as if they missed the past 30 years of rock history; perhaps they drank the memory away.
While it may not be as blistering as the band's early work, or even this year's "live" Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo-- because where else could you really go after that?-- Good Bad nonetheless stands tall in their catalog for finding a way to turn it down without becoming tame. Here, Black Lips fold all of the bacchanalia into the corners of direct, vintage pop songs, so that the new tracks have taken on an ominous tone without being quite as off-the-rails as the band's reputation would suggest. Note the brief moments of backwards guitar in the otherwise, uh, lean "Lean", a twangy undistorted march with plenty of echo on the ragged vocals.
"Veni Vidi Vici" is the biggest and wariest step forward, with a drum loop somewhere between Motown and Madchester, replete with a vibra-slap that will forever evoke hot summer evenings and a chorus that's as irrepressible and arrogant as a soccer chant. Yet for the most part, Black Lips don't stray from their comfort zone, they just push that zone outward. Their spooky quasi-mystical element gets much spookier on "Lock and Key", a blues vamp slithering its way from an Indian burial ground, and their flower-punk gets more flowery on "It Feels Alright" (formerly "Good Bad Not Evil"), where singer Cole Alexander varies his voice to evoke two singers-- a touch that's charming, almost comical, and completely punk.
The band is still preoccupied with its reckless bad-boy image, as "Bad Kids" is a country-inflected sing-along to the merits of irresponsibility that sounds so puerile it's almost self-deprecating. Still, they're hardly one-note here: "Cold Hands" is the record's lead-off single and probably its catchiest song, but it's more wounded than brash, lyrically occupied with trying the straight and narrow and failing rather than eschewing it entirely. It's a nice change of pace that hits a new emotional center-- for two-and-a-half minutes anyway.
Throwbacks to earlier albums-- such as "Slime and Oxygen", with its stomping circular rhythms, caterwauling guitar bends, and more-than-usual vocal echo-- already pale next to the braver material. Even the record's few missteps are at least adventurous, including colliding immaturity with more mysticism on the toy-piano-led "Transcendental Light". Were you to grab any of their older records-- which you really should-- you could hear a band out-freak the best of them. But Good Bad Not Evil is evidence that they want to do something more, which is heartening-- and here they've accomplished it. | 2007-09-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-09-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Vice | September 6, 2007 | 8.3 | 54f4b219-55fb-4165-b678-c32b70692ca1 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
Adopting the atmospherics of the Clientele and Real Esate, this Captured Tracks band manages to be both evocative and technically proficient. | Adopting the atmospherics of the Clientele and Real Esate, this Captured Tracks band manages to be both evocative and technically proficient. | Beach Fossils: Beach Fossils | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14281-beach-fossils/ | Beach Fossils | If you've followed indie's trade winds over the past year and a half, you can probably predict what a Brooklyn band called Beach Fossils sounds like to a staggeringly accurate degree. In this case, please set aside the prejudices: Beach Fossils aren't merely trying to evoke the feeling of sand between your toes, and even if you think you've mentally checked out of anything summery and lo-fi, this is a wonderful record. Dustin Payseur's Captured Tracks band claims influence from improvisational jazz, classical music, and Stereolab, and his songwriting owes more to loop-based composition than garage-bound woodshedding. From the functionality of the song titles on down, Beach Fossils has purpose and economy. It's built on cleanly picked single notes stacked over complementary bass patterns and unobtrusive drums.
Despite working in generally constricted song patterns-- there's little in the way of verse/chorus structure-- Payseur has no problem letting his vocals and guitar craft hooks. In fact, it's the guitar riffs that you'll probably end up humming: check the pitch-shifted Peter Hook homage on "Daydream", the tight "Youth", or "Sometimes", on which Payseur falls just shy of soloing. Drift and atmosphere also work for Beach Fossils: the breezy coda of "Window View" feels like it could drift forever as long as it handed you a lemonade part of the way through.
The way Payseur's vocals are masked with reverb brings to mind the early singles of the Clientele, while the interlocking musicianship bears a lot of similarity to their tourmates in Real Estate. But while Payseur has an ingenuity with melody, what keeps him from reaching the heights of those acts is a lack of true immersion. The Clientele's Alasdair MacLean works in miniature, capturing evocative details that we otherwise miss in our daily lives; Real Estate's Martin Courtney is big-picture, using a generalized suburbia as a backdrop for larger philosophical points. In comparison, the mundanity of Beach Fossils can be deflating, and you don't catch much on the fifth listen that you didn't on the first-- a song called "Vacation" is about taking a bus out of town, while "Golden Age" and "Daydream" are nearly every bit as literal.
Yet the lack of guile can also be a strength, giving Beach Fossils a directness often attributed to more aggressive styles of music. Detractors might claim that this stuff isn't particularly challenging, but in light of its near-Memorial Day release date, doing so feels like criticizing white t-shirts or ice cream cones. This is an uncomplicated soundtrack for relief, which "Lazy Day" puts forth most pointedly. It's something like the photo negative of Wavves' "So Bored", not just sonically but philosophically-- having fuck all to do isn't some sort of grounds for cracking up, but for kicking back and enjoying it. | 2010-05-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-05-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Captured Tracks | May 24, 2010 | 7.8 | 54f583c2-09cb-4ff9-98d9-ac0f7c46eb92 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Brian Eno is rarely idle. His latest, Someday World, is a collaboration with Underworld’s Karl Hyde, and, like much of Eno’s recent output, it’s released by Warp. Eno's presented the record as a collection of half-thoughts he tried to salvage after browsing through a stray hard drive one afternoon. | Brian Eno is rarely idle. His latest, Someday World, is a collaboration with Underworld’s Karl Hyde, and, like much of Eno’s recent output, it’s released by Warp. Eno's presented the record as a collection of half-thoughts he tried to salvage after browsing through a stray hard drive one afternoon. | Brian Eno / Karl Hyde: Someday World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19313-brian-eno-karl-hyde-someday-world/ | Someday World | Brian Eno is rarely idle. In 1996 he published a book titled A Year With Swollen Appendices, which detailed his extraordinary life over a 12-month span. Even his quiet days, it seems, have some sense of purpose to them. For the book's September 25 entry*,* he doesn’t do much at all, aside from noting two phone calls that came through: one from David Bowie, the other from Paul McCartney. Although much has surely changed since then, his workrate hasn’t dipped, and the albums keep coming. His latest, Someday World, is a collaboration with Underworld’s Karl Hyde, and, like much of Eno’s recent output, it’s released by Warp. Eno hasn't exactly given this album the hard sell, instead presenting it as a collection of half-thoughts he tried to salvage after browsing through a stray hard drive one afternoon. “I had a big collection of 'beginnings' sitting around waiting for something to galvanise them into life, to make them more than just 'experiments,'" he said in advance of the album's release.
So Someday World may not be built on the most exciting premise, but even Eno’s malformed thoughts are usually worth a look, or a listen, or a read, depending on which medium he’s currently working in. Here, he brings in a group of collaborators alongside Hyde, including familiar accomplices (Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay, Coldplay’s Will Champion), a family member (his daughter, Darla Eno), and a co-producer in his early twenties (Fred Gibson). It sounds expensive, in the way that Eno’s production for Coldplay or U2 often does, although with less obvious ambition beyond being an outlet for a group of people to work in ways they perhaps haven’t before. There’s form and structure, although whether it was always there or devised after the fact is difficult to discern. As Someday World progresses, it gradually falls into that bracket of projects that were probably much more fun to record than they are to listen to.
Eno talked about how we are “deep in the grid period of making music” in reference to computer-based composition in 2010, and that's the place this album is rigidly stuck in. There’s no looseness here, very little space to move around in. The mode is largely set to “pop” throughout, but only in the sense that Eno and Hyde are reaching for catchy, polished rhythms. Strangely, for someone so reticent to expand on his past, it’s a resolutely backward looking work by Eno’s standards. Everything feels a little old, including the jungle-lite drums (“Daddy’s Car”), nods to '90s electronica (“When I Built This World”), and the creeping fear of Blur’s 13 (“Mother of a Dog”).
It doesn’t help that Hyde sounds particularly uninspired, only finding function on the obvious standout tracks (“Daddy’s Car”, “Who Rings the Bell”). The deliberate strain in his voice grates by the time track nine comes around, sounding like years of coasting through unremarkable Underworld albums like Barking has taken its toll. It may have been difficult for Hyde to find a way in here—the precision-tooled arrangements don’t often open up much room for him, leaving him stranded somewhere above the music but never fully immersed in it. He’s more observer than participant, letting a watching-the-world-go-by glassiness settle in as his vocals take a distinct back seat to the studio trickery.
The record runs out of steam around “Witness”, where a deadpan Miss Kittin-style female vocal is threaded over the top. (Thankfully, it exits just as the ghosts of electroclash’s past are whipping at Eno and Hyde's ankles.) Someday World is well arranged, meticulously produced, even catchy at times. But there’s an overriding sense of aimlessness, of people just dropping by the studio and breezing into the songs before wafting off to a more important appointment. For an Eno work, it’s disappointingly lacking in direction. | 2014-05-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-05-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | May 5, 2014 | 6.2 | 54f9040d-51ad-4fec-82d2-7a5eacb5587d | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
This 2xCD set gathers together the Britpop band's singles on one disc, with another well-chosen disc of album tracks and B-sides. | This 2xCD set gathers together the Britpop band's singles on one disc, with another well-chosen disc of album tracks and B-sides. | Suede: The Best of Suede | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14853-the-best-of-suede/ | The Best of Suede | When Britpop first began to cohere as a concept and a potential mission statement, no band defined its vague, abstract ideas better than Suede. By the time Britpop became an actual going concern, Suede were simply grandfathered in; and when the whole thing spittered to its post-Oasis peak, Suede were considered washed up. But in 1993, they were the creators of the fastest-selling debut LP in UK history and had been anointed as saviors of British indie before their debut single, "The Drowners", even hit the shops. This made them a natural for the British press to create ideas around, and so when Select argued for a return to wit, artifice, glamor, and British art school traditions, Suede were easy avatars for those hopes.
Wit, artifice, and glamor may have been foreign to bands like Oasis or Cast or Ocean Colour Scene, but for many in 1993 they were welcome respites from a hangover of faceless, egoless electronic producers and gruff, dour American arena rock. On the relative margins of UK music, Tricky and PJ Harvey and the Tindersticks lurked-- and the Aueturs and Saint Etienne were also considered prototypical British hopes-- but Suede could articulate the desires of the outsider while broadcasting over Radio 1. Like Pulp, although perhaps neither band would be into the comparison, Suede were a more acceptable and easy to grasp Big New Thing. And, also like Pulp, they were comfortable creating complex pop songs about human relationships-- fluid with notions of sexuality and openly pursuant of lust and animal drives in an demure indie world that favors flowers and letters. Try to imagine, for example, Jarvis Cocker or Brett Anderson wooing someone by making them a mixtape?
Unusually, however, they were introspective about the whole thing too. While American glam revivalists like the Dandy Warhols wallowed in a cliché of leather jackets and rock'n'roll decadence, Suede inhabited those worlds at night and seemed to be able make some sense of the consequences and their motivations in the light of day. They did epic and visceral but they also did delicate and tortured. These twin poles-- crunchy glam rock and fragile balladeering-- found them at their best. They slipped when they lived between those worlds, aiming for the midtempo and MOR. As a result, there's a lot to admire about Suede, and a lot to ridicule, and they typically go hand in hand. In the end, Suede had no tribal allegiances, and few nationalistic desires; they were essentially fueled by youth, low-rent glamor, available drugs, cheap thrills, and the hangover and harm one gets from their pursuit. If they romanticized anything, it was being young and bored and free. Ordinariness was the enemy.
The group was undoubtedly at its best during its first few years, when guitarist Bernard Butler was still acting as ambitious musical foil to singer Brett Anderson's anguished, romantic lyricist, and this is reflected on the new 2xCD collection The Best of Suede. The first disc of the set is essentially a replay of their singles collection, dropping a few late inessentials; the second is a very well-chosen selection of album tracks and B-sides from throughout their career, but mostly from the era surrounding the band's 1993 self-titled debut and 1994's Dog Man Star, which was finished without Butler after a walkout over creative differences.
On the whole then, this provides a pretty complete, accurate picture of who Suede were, something that would have been incomplete without that second disc. The group's singles tend to fall into the glam-rock half of their work; it's disc two that elevates this set into something special, and into all the Suede that most people will ever need. In hindsight, it's striking how little the band fit into the landscape that coalesced around it. The band's first five singles-- "The Drowners", "Metal Mickey", "Animal Nitrate", "So Young", and "Stay Together"-- and their B-sides (five of which are here) foisted a charismatic, direct group onto the UK's shoegaze- and Madchester-soaked indie scene of the years prior.
In the end, Britpop soon became about a desperate need to fit in; Suede made great pains, for a time, to stand out. The protracted Dog Man Star sessions left the band in a few pieces, but the sheer scale and willingness to work without a net was at odds with most of their peers. The resulting record is full of pomp or pomposity depending on whom you ask, and there are no apologies for it here: The band wisely include the full, widescreen 20-minute run of "The 2 of Us", "The Asphalt World", and "Still Life" on this compilation.
After the departure of Butler, Suede again kicked against fashion: Unlike their pioneering peers, however-- Blur looked west for their self-titled 1997 album; Pulp made a hangover record-- they eased into the second phase of their career by retreating to their past. When guitarist Bernard Butler split to put together one great single with David McAlmont, and little else, Suede hired Richard Oakes, a 17-year-old Bulter acolyte located through their fanclub. Oakes did his best Butler-circa-Suede impersonation on their comeback LP Coming Up, and Anderson shifted into self-parody on a few of his lyrics. The band got by on hooks and gumption, and oddly became a bigger success than ever, enjoying five Top 10 singles in the UK and taking off throughout the rest of Europe.
Retracing their steps was naturally a sloppy affair creatively, however, with second-hand retreads and just plain gaffes. Another weak album later, and a comeback that few remember, filled out the rest of the group's career, and although the cherry-picked songs from those sessions sound better here in retrospect, nobody was going to break sales records or receive early hype based on the strength of something like "Everything Will Flow". These few songs are here to make up the numbers and provide a complete picture. And this is a complete picture: This is one of the most warts-and-all bands of our time-- their risk/reward divide was off the charts. In today's more timid climate, it would be almost unthinkable. | 2010-11-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-11-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Suede Limited | November 11, 2010 | 8.7 | 54fc7773-e1ea-4631-aa36-47b6aba6f3b0 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
10.1 is a two-disc set—the first in a series, no less—celebrating 10 years of the Hyperdub label, with one disc collecting tracks from the archive and the other showcasing new material. It's an expansive and impressive look at what makes this hard-to-pigeonhole label consistently exciting. | 10.1 is a two-disc set—the first in a series, no less—celebrating 10 years of the Hyperdub label, with one disc collecting tracks from the archive and the other showcasing new material. It's an expansive and impressive look at what makes this hard-to-pigeonhole label consistently exciting. | Various Artists: Hyperdub 10.1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19356-hyperdub-101/ | Hyperdub 10.1 | In 2003, writer Steve Goodman, now known to keyed-in music nerds as the producer Kode9, was interviewing Kevin Martin, the mastermind behind the bombed-out dub project the Bug, for dance publication XLR8R. The conversation turned to dubstep, the roots of which were just starting to take hold in London; Martin heard a track of Goodman’s, who was just then cutting his teeth as a producer, and he encouraged him to start a label to release it, promising to help find a distributor. Less than a year later came HYP001, “Sign of the Dub” b/w “Stalker”, a collaborative release between Kode9 and UK rapper Spaceape (then credited as Daddy Gee).
For Hyperdub’s first four years, the label moved carefully when it came to releases. Most of their output from 2004–2006 was credited to Goodman and Spaceape, including the duo’s debut LP Memories of the Future, but they also worked with some guy named William Bevan, whose self-titled debut LP as Burial came in 2006, a year after Goodman put out the project’s wobbly first 12“, South London Boroughs. Burial was a modest record that initially attracted curiosity more than it did accolades, but in 2007 Bevan returned with the excellent Ghost Hardware 12” and the instant classic Untrue, a record that came to define dubstep for legions of new listeners seven years before Merriam Webster decided to define it themselves.
One of the most influential electronic records in recent memory, Untrue cemented Bevan as one of the decade’s most vital producers and introduced dubstep (more as a concept, less as a sound) to a much wider audience. So you can imagine what its success did for Hyperdub. A brief glance at the label’s chronological catalog resembles a dam about to burst, and Untrue was the low frequency that shook the firmament to the point of collapse. In 2008 came releases from up-and-coming names that, six years later, are familiar to anyone in the know: bass music basket case Zomby, abstracted pop outfit Darkstar (who at that point were working with a more explicitly dance-focused sound), dubstep-gone-freestyle queen Ikonika. Martin’s lover’s rock-focused King Midas Sound project even put out their first release for the label that year.
Hyperdub marked their fifth anniversary in 2009, but despite a half-decade of existence, the label’s creative surge had kicked into high gear only two years previous. So the excellent 5 Years of Hyperdub was as much an overview of where Hyperdub had been as it was a chance to draw on the increased exposure electronic music was receiving and define something approaching a “scene.” Ace cuts from Los Angeles hip-hop auteur Flying Lotus, Dutch dance producer Martyn, and dub-as-fuck mad scientist Mala appeared alongside catalog highlights from label regulars Kode9, LV, and yes, Burial.
5 Years of Hyperdub was the culmination of a series of five 12" releases collecting label highlights—5.1, 5.2, you get the idea—and the expanded approach Hyperdub’s taken to that concept for their 10-year anniversary is indicative of how quickly Goodman’s label has grown, both in size and influence. 10.1 is a two-CD set—the first in the series, no less—with one disc collecting tracks from the label’s last five years and one with entirely new material. Each compilation will have a theme, and 10.1 turns its focus towards dancefloor-centered cuts, so those waiting for a collection of Hyperdub’s stranger entries might have to wait a little longer.
That said, 10.1 is more proof that Hyperdub can’t help but embrace left-of-center even as it focuses on club fare. This is far from a bad thing: Hyperdub’s released some of the most appealingly odd and oddly prescient electronic music of the last 15 years, and the glaring omissions from this volume’s disc of catalog cuts—Terror Danjah’s fiery grime tune “Acid” from 2010, Ossie’s bubbly UK Funky cut “Set the Tone” from 2011, the jagged piano-house of Laurel Halo’s “Throw”, from last year's Behind the Green Door EP—only serve to highlight the wealth of material the label has released.
Dance music label comps serve a dual purpose: 1) provide an accessible way for non-collectors to obtain material that might’ve received limited release; 2) offer labels a way to define their legacy or current position in the music landscape. 10.1 fulfills the first function simply by existing, and effectively flips two middle fingers towards the second. One of the most intriguing elements of Hyperdub’s output is its sheer unpredictability and refusal of easy categorization. The closest thing to dubstep proper on the first disc is Burial and Spaceape’s Burial cut “Spaceape”, an obvious nod to Hyperdub’s humble beginnings; from there, we’re hit with variations on the breezy skip of Funky (Funkystepz’s “Hurricane Riddim”, Ill Blu’s “Clapper”), 8-bit fantasias (Ikonika’s “Idiot”, Walton’s “Aggy”), low-slung hip-hop (Mark Pritchard and Om’mas Keith’s “Wind It Up”), and effervescent grime (Kode9’s “Xingfu Lu”).
In addition to shining a light on the difficulty of categorizing Hyperdub, the old-stuff collection is further proof that the label’s vision is always trained forward. Appearances from regulars Ikonika and Cooly G are a reminder that, along with Laurel Halo and Canadian techno-pop architect Jessy Lanza, Hyperdub’s been one of the few of-the-moment dance labels to consistently showcase female artists. Stylistically, they’ve also found themselves ahead of the curve: Morgan Zarate’s as-of-yet-underappreciated “Hookid”, from 2011, is a tangled sigh of staircase tones, phased-out bass hits, and cascading synths ripped from Southern U.S. hip-hop. At the time, it was a curiosity; in 2014, it sounds like a trap precedent, if that sound’s basic elements were scrambled in a blender and poured all over some poor sap’s kitchen counter.
The new-stuff disc offers few hints as to where the label is headed next, which is unsurprising, but the variety on display is only matched by the quality of the tunes themselves. Detroit techno fiend Kyle Hall’s “Girl U So Strong” builds and breaks with wheezing tones and backbeats, a throaty diva shout occasionally popping up to offer an anchor; Zarate returns with the hard-hitting “Kaytsu”, a track even more explicitly trap than the genre-predicting “Hookid”, while the relatively quiet producer Kuedo (whose 2011 LP Severant still stands as an overlooked gem) returns with a track dubbed after his namesake and sporting his signature Vangelis-meets-Big Tymers style of aural hypnotism. Following the explicit reggae of his Essential Mix from last year, Mala delivers one of his meanest anthems to date with the stomping “Expected”, while Japanese producer and Hyperdub mainstay Quarta330 closes out the disc with the hyper-colorful “Hanabi”.
The “what’s to come” section takes up the back half of 10.1’s fresh-jams collection, in the form of a stretch of footwork primarily from the Teklife crew. Footwork continues to gain a greater presence in the electronic world, aided by fellow UK label Planet Mu’s scene-surveying Bangs & Works compilations and cemented by last year’s classic LP from the late DJ Rashad, Double Cup. Earlier this year, Goodman told The Japan Times that he was drawn to getting involved with the genre by way of Planet Mu founder Mike Paradinas: “Mike said to me, ‘Go on, release this stuff, because everyone thinks I’m crazy.’”
Paradinas had a point—footwork in its rawest form can be grating, and the stretch of brown-sound bass hits and repetitive vocal samples that mark the back half of the first disc of 10.1 may lead to a few headaches. But Hyperdub’s embrace of the genre was perfectly timed, and the cuts presented here showcase a scene that is further mutating and innovating as it gains more widespread attention. Taso & Djunya’s “Only the Strong Survive” pairs footwork’s intense focus with a starry-eyed sense of wonder, DJ Spinn“’s ”All My Teklife“ features synths that glisten so bright they threaten to overpower everything else around them, and DJ Earl’s ”I’m Gonna Get You" hammers its titular phrase home to the point of aggravation until the sample drops out with a sense of relief before revving up all over again.
Rashad appears posthumously on both discs of 10.1: along with DJ Taye, he had a hand in DJ Earl’s other cut on the new disc, the typically intense “Bombaklot”, and Rashad and Gant-Man further explore Double Cup’s acid techno flirtations on the enjoyable “Acid Life”. He also closes out the disc of catalog highlights—the comp was announced well before Rashad’s sudden and tragic death last month, so this is an unusual occurrence of timing above all else—with the epochal “Let It Go”. A titanic track that could be considered footwork’s own “Strings of Life”, “Let It Go” has a classic, immovable sound, as a lone drum machine kicks things off before meeting up with the endlessly, blissfully repeated vocal sample. Some warped strings enter, and for a second it seems like things are off—“Something doesn’t sound right” is, granted, an understandable reaction to most footwork—but then the vocal sample completes itself with a diva’s cry, “Baaa-by/ Bayyyyyy-beeeeee”, that hits like a gut-punch.
“Let It Go” was released on March 18, 2013, as part of Rashad’s excellent Rollin’ EP for Hyperdub; a year, one month, and eight days later, he was found dead at his home in Chicago’s West Side. Before his death, I must have personally listened to “Let It Go” at least eight or nine times a week, and every time I put it on, it took me places that only the most impressionistically beautiful pieces of music can go. I’ve listened to it while feeling sad, happy, unsure, frustrated, in love, out of place—basically, it’s music I put on when I want to feel something. After Rashad’s death, the urge to latch onto the track’s more melancholy aspects is there, but every time I reach for “Let It Go”, the flood of emotions remains rich and complex. Rashad touched a lot of people with his visionary, melodic approach to footwork, and the dance community has only begun feeling the effects of his legacy; amidst the incredible collection of tunes on 10.1, “Let It Go” is proof that, even in the ever-changing world of electronic music, it’s possible to create something that sounds absolutely timeless. | 2014-05-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Hyperdub | May 21, 2014 | 8.5 | 55070ec1-3ef3-4684-bdeb-5e9437bd26dd | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The latest in the RVNG's series of improv collabs between experimental music veterans and their contemporary counterparts includes minimalist David Borden. | The latest in the RVNG's series of improv collabs between experimental music veterans and their contemporary counterparts includes minimalist David Borden. | Borden, Ferraro, Godin, Halo & Lopatin: FRKWYS Vol. 7 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15654-frkwys-vol-7/ | FRKWYS Vol. 7 | The concept for RVNG's FRKWYS series-- meetings between young experimental musicians and veterans-- is nothing revolutionary, but so far the results have been quite rich for one-off collaborations. That trend continues with Vol. 7, for which the label first approached Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never. Together they brainstormed a project involving minimalist composer David Borden. The latter's résumé is wide-- even including a mostly-unused score for The Exorcist-- but he's best known for founding the synth ensemble Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company. That group began in 1969 playing Moog versions of pieces by Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich. Soon they began composing their own music and experimenting with newer electronics, something they continue to do today.
Such openness to sounds and ideas comes through on the five pieces here, which are impressively varied despite being pretty uncomplicated. Part of that variety is due to the participants Lopatin brought into this session last August-- James Ferraro, Laurel Halo, and Samuel Godin, all open creative minds on their own. But what's most impressive about Vol. 7 is how it never sounds like a mess of piled up activity, or five voices elbowing for room. If someone told you this was made by one person, you'd probably believe them. So it's not too far-fetched to guess that, for two days in the studio, these five became of one mind, joined by a simple sonic vision.
Perhaps Borden is just that forceful a musical personality, steering his comrades toward a very distinct set of goals. However these tracks came together, the unity of purpose is evident throughout. It starts from the very first seconds of opener "People of the Wind Pt. 1", a 12-minute drone that constantly builds and expands, marrying airy etherealness to dense guts in a way that recalls Stars of the Lid's best epics. From there, the ensemble winds through a range of moods and timbres. "Internet Gospel Pt. 1" warps like an underwater wedding processional; "People of the Wind Pt. 2" adds a sense of galactic transmission to Pt. 1; and "Twilight Pacific" fuses Lopatin's flowing repetitions to Borden's Terry Riley-ish all-night-flight inclinations. All of this can get pretty spacey and drifting; you'll need some predilection for things like OPN, Emeralds, or the early Kranky roster to fully dig into such synthed-out pieces.
Stick with it, though, and you'll get rewarded by closer "Just a Little Pollution", whose rippling synths and haunting Julee Cruise-like vocals-- presumably provided by Halo-- make it a kind of otherworldly pop song. It's as if these sonic sculptors spent the previous five tracks chiseling away at a big block of sound until it produced this shiny little gem. It's remarkable enough that this one-time alliance produced so much good improvised music, an approach so dependent on listening and communication that it can take years of trial and error to create the right working situation. But the fact that they also made that music build to an album-ending peak gives Vol. 7 a shot at being a record that holds up over time, regardless of how impermanent this group itself may be. | 2011-07-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-07-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Rvng Intl. | July 20, 2011 | 7.7 | 550eb3a3-68ce-4d64-8a5f-70c97321318c | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The enigmatic songwriter’s latest album is full of vignettes that shift to reveal and conceal themselves in ways too unpredictable to be easily faked. It might be his best yet. | The enigmatic songwriter’s latest album is full of vignettes that shift to reveal and conceal themselves in ways too unpredictable to be easily faked. It might be his best yet. | Alex G: House of Sugar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sandy-alex-g-house-of-sugar/ | House of Sugar | Alex Giannascoli’s songs draw weird poignancy from the ordinary. The artist who records under the enigmatic name (Sandy) Alex G mixes the real and the imagined, the possibly-biographical and the probably-fictional in the same breath. His songwriting is detailed but stubbornly opaque, swathed in a fuzz as thick and soft as dryer lint. This unassuming style, initially developed over a half-dozen EPs and albums released independently online, bleeds together DIY rock and homemade folk with snatches of country, industrial, or electronic. He’s become an undeniable, if low-wattage star of 2010s indie rock.
His third album for Domino, House of Sugar, is the clearest and most inviting articulation of his skewed aesthetic. It employs most all of the things that make Alex G songs sound like Alex G songs: sturdy, ragged chord progressions; abstract, existential-leaning lyrics; Molly Germer’s homey violin playing; squeaky, pitch-shifted vocals like the voices you’d give your own bad ideas. The title refers to both the SugarHouse Casino in Philadelphia and the gingerbread house from “Hansel and Gretel.” Like a fairy tale, the album is both sweet and sinister, layering different modes to obscure its true intentions. These are songs about feeling discomfort in the gaze of others, vignettes that shift to reveal and conceal themselves in ways too unpredictable to be easily faked. “You and me/These are titles I can hardly speak,” Alex croons over the barn-dance sway of “Southern Sky.”
Mixer Jacob Portrait, who’s worked on Alex G albums since 2015’s Beach Music, brings out professional-quality fidelity without clearing the cloudy textures. House of Sugar is full of little instrumental parts and mumbled background vocals that come through and fall away without necessarily building or resolving, like students in a school pageant. As with earlier albums, it’s studded with experiments: “Project 2,” an interlude of fluting vaporwave synths, and “Sugar,” where melodramatic violin and piano are coated in Vocodered gurgles. They’re less interruptions than camouflage; “Sugar” leads into the open chords and tender Elliott Smith coos of “In My Arms.” “He lay his head/Back on my chest/Once had a wife/Now nobody’s left,” Alex murmurs.
The best moments on House of Sugar are like this, bittersweet and empathetic. “He was a good friend of mine/He died/Why write about it now/Gotta honor him somehow,” he sings in the matter-of-fact opening lines of “Hope,” but the scene fades to a raucous celebration of life: “In the house they were calling out his name/All night/Taking turns on the bed/Throwing bottles from the windows of the home/On Hope Street.” Alex’s late friend isn’t named; the only name is the street, Hope, an emotional coincidence too improbable to believe from anyone else. In his dreamy, surreal landscape, it makes total sense.
The album closer, recorded live at a November 2018 show in St. Louis, is another of these perfectly imperfect Alex G gestures. “SugarHouse” is a song for closing down the bar, but Giannascoli’s words transform the concert crowd into weary gamblers at the end of a long, artificial day: “You never really met me/I don’t think anyone has/But we can still be players together/Let SugarHouse pick up the tab.” They’re the words of a man conflicted about himself, but not his intentions—an appeal to the type of community that comes from the bottom, not from the top. There’s enough space in Alex G’s stories to tell your own.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | September 16, 2019 | 8.6 | 55112fdf-0b00-4edb-89e7-c3eedad356da | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
Recalling Cabaret Voltaire and the darker strains of Detroit techno, Gatekeeper offer an eerie and entrancing slab of carefully reconstituted 80s synths. | Recalling Cabaret Voltaire and the darker strains of Detroit techno, Gatekeeper offer an eerie and entrancing slab of carefully reconstituted 80s synths. | Gatekeeper: Giza EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14980-giza-ep/ | Giza EP | Last year, around the time Salem were causing such an online ruckus by marrying exploitation movie aesthetics to plodding beats, Pitchfork contributor Philip Sherburne wrote a piece on his blog that attempted to link the vogue for "witch house" to a wider trend toward dark, dank electronic music. He cast a wide net, from the krautrock-ish Emeralds to the haunted sound of post-Burial dubstep. But he also noted that, whatever the subgenre, the vibe of "much of it [is] specifically rooted in the apocalyptic aesthetics of the mid-80s," a time when Cold War horror seemed to leak into even the dance-your-cares-away world of club music.
Perhaps no new act exemplifies this aesthetic as much as sometime Salem associates Gatekeeper. From its cover art (an Atari cartridge meets the Portable Grindhouse aesthetic?) to its sound, Giza is a slab of carefully reconstituted 80s synths. Gatekeeper combine elements of mid-period Cabaret Voltaire (the eerie, unintelligible sampled moans and growls), the most sinister stalking-you-down-a-dark-alley strains of Detroit techno (think Suburban Knight more than Derrick May), and the on-the-cheap choral grandeur of every keyboard-owning "composer" ever tasked to rip off Vangelis' score for Blade Runner.
Obviously Gatekeeper's members are neck-deep in nostalgia for this era. Not for nothing is Giza's accompanying video collection being released on VHS. That kind of over-the-top commitment to retro is rare indeed. But still, do we really need another spot-the-reference exercise from a couple of guys who never quite got over the 80s?
We do when it's executed with this kind of audacity and intensity. Sure, Giza's period detail is exquisitely rendered, with a bright and crisp sound in direct opposition to the digital murk of the witch house crew. But though Gatekeeper clearly know their history, this is miles from the stuffy, deadening world of vintage keyboard connoisseurship. The vibe of Giza is pure suburban hoodrat thrills, over-amped electronic music made for teenage metalheads playing coin-op games in grotty strip mall arcades. And despite Gatekeeper's audible love for Z-grade horror flicks, this isn't really bleak stuff. Gatekeeper realize that there's also lot of kitschy joy to be had with such superficially spooky materials, and at its best Giza offers the same kind of brute adrenaline rush this stuff gave good-natured darkness junkies the first time around. | 2011-01-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-01-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Merok | January 10, 2011 | 7.7 | 5519d2b9-3a9b-4551-865c-346c9dfbee0f | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Keep You is post-hardcore outfit Pianos Become the Teeth's first album for punk heavyweight Epitaph, and it's a more restrained record compared to its predecessors. | Keep You is post-hardcore outfit Pianos Become the Teeth's first album for punk heavyweight Epitaph, and it's a more restrained record compared to its predecessors. | Pianos Become the Teeth: Keep You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19931-pianos-become-the-teeth-keep-you/ | Keep You | Pianos Become the Teeth sound exhausted on Keep You. As well they should. For the better part of a decade, they’ve created music of extreme emotional and physical engagement, music tagged as “post-hardcore” because of the reverberating guitars and five-minute song lengths or “screamo” by the less self-conscious. Their 2009 debut Old Pride had a recording of Kyle Durfey’s mother describing the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis on her husband, a perversely calm moment because words were being spoken instead of yelled. Longevity isn’t expected out of the bands or the people in it, and there are an equal number of former and current members of Pianos Become the Teeth. Several moonlight with Geoff Rickly’s hyperbolic, great punk rock and roll swindle United Nations; by comparison, that’s a fun band. And now here’s Keep You, the result of Pianos Become the Teeth spending the past three years switching labels and drastically reconfiguring their sound, consequently putting everything at risk. You will feel the burn.
Keep You is Pianos' first album for punk heavyweight Epitaph, which likely means it will be an introduction for many. If that’s your situation, take a few listens to their previous highlights and know going in to Keep You that Durfey does not scream once. This is important for several reasons, the least of which is that a lot of their older fans are pissed. Because it turns out that he can actually sing, and in a rich, resonant register rarely heard in indie rock and often associated with flannel-clad he-men of various stripes. But these are lyrics that require subtlety and range, as Keep You edges towards acceptance following the four stages of grieving that preceded it. During opener “Ripple Water Shine”, Durfey takes himself to task—“I'm still always slowly waiting for what follows/For what I've learned about being so defined by someone dying,” and going forward, he does raise his voice, but it never cracks. In this music, you process and tolerate your inner turmoil rather than drowning it out.
Meanwhile, here’s drummer David Haik performing some of Pianos’ older material. He doesn’t do that either on Keep You; he’s just as active and dexterous, but nowhere near as loud, darting around “Repine” and “Ripple Water Shine”, reminding the listener of the herculean effort they’re putting forward to repress their rage and how that could fail them; they probably won’t lash out, but they might. And these are guitarists who haven’t lost their technical prowess either, they just don’t have to play as fast or loud—Chad McDonald and Mike York rely on fingerpicked patterns and blunt-force chording to alternately constrict, mesmerize, soothe and bludgeon.
So, to recap—no screaming, musicians of conservatory-level aptitude practicing extreme restraint, and producer Will Yip doing his best Peter Katis impersonation, keeping the vocals and percussion at the fore to establish intimacy in an otherwise hall-filling sound. Maybe Pianos Become the Teeth aspire to be the post-hardcore National? It’s not far-fetched when you listen back to the outsized, half-sung “Hiding”, which was included on a split 7” with Touché Amoré, who would later cover “Available”. So Keep You is a progression more than a clean break, and the best way to put yourself at the forefront of post-hardcore these days is to prove that you’re kinda done with it. If Keep You was intended as their way of separating themselves from Touché Amoré and La Dispute, they’ve succeeded. But they're now just parallel to each other.
Pianos’ craft is certainly at the level of Is Survived By and Rooms of the House, which already feel like future standards, but Keep You doesn’t have the same populist appeal. Everything here will bring a circle pit to a dead halt, while melodic hooks and catharsis are scarce. Moreover, Durfey isn’t a storyteller like La Dispute’s Jordan Dreyer, nor does he speak in rallying cries like Touché Amoré’s Jeremy Bolm. Keep You’s lyricism bears a greater similarity to early Mark Kozelek, captivating in its evocative detail and conversely, prone to detail so personal, it’s intimidating. Both aspects are prevalent during the stunning postmortem of “April”, where Durfey drinks from a tin mug with an engraved date and even he’s unsure of its meaning—“What happened 7/31/76 that made them etch your name and the date?/ What'd I miss? It was a Saturday”. Even the person it’s addressed to is unclear—“I got your picture sitting on the sink...Water dripped and hit your cheek in the right spot/ It ruined my week, when I just wanted to wash the filth off.”
Emotionally pulverizing moments like these are so common throughout Keep You that it becomes something close to critic-proof. It’s certainly got its musical shortcomings, but they that shrink in light of its potential to level those who can get past them. Whenever Durfey’s lyrics get too insular, there’s the recognition that by giving so much of himself, the best response is to give right back. Only Durfey and his family know the stories behind lines like, "I've never had that old Ed size/ I've never had Robert's prison guard skin", and, "How odd life would be if you had made it from Elmira to Kansas City/ Instead you cried the whole way, punching the wheel home." But you can relate if there are people in your past have been reduced to physical signifiers and the geographic signifiers are only relevant in your ability to understand the scale between them, of leaving a suburb for the “big city” and being paralyzed with fear.
When it seems like Keep You’s achromatic desolation is too unrelenting, you catch a reference to memories formed in places like Arcade, New York and Seven Valleys, Pennsylvania. The latter is a town of less than 500 near the Maryland border; I’m guessing you’ve never been because damn near no one has. But if you’ve ever driven through anywhere in the rural mid-Atlantic, particularly during this time of the year, you might recognize the ache and strange hope in the barren trees, endless fields and rundown building showing some kind of resilience in the middle of nowhere. It’s bleak and beautiful in the same way Keep You is, and it gives a lot provided you put your share of effort into it. And so you’ll probably feel exhausted after listening to Keep You; as well you should. | 2014-11-03T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2014-11-03T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Epitaph | November 3, 2014 | 7.3 | 551b2ad7-5c14-4ce8-afae-fc1263712332 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On her third album, the Brooklyn musician scraps the synths and elaborate arrangements of her last LP, opting for a stripped-down combo and songs written as fast as the rush of feelings that inspired them. | On her third album, the Brooklyn musician scraps the synths and elaborate arrangements of her last LP, opting for a stripped-down combo and songs written as fast as the rush of feelings that inspired them. | Margaret Glaspy: Echo the Diamond | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/margaret-glaspy-echo-the-diamond/ | Echo the Diamond | Margaret Glaspy had only a couple of EPs to her name when she told an interviewer that she wanted to approach songwriting “like a job.” Whatever the Brooklyn-based, Northern California-born artist’s creative process, it paid off on her debut album, 2016’s Emotions and Math, a spare and spiky set of broadly rooted songs that showed off her electric guitar, spellbinding voice, and conversational lyrics. On her synth-oriented follow-up, 2020’s Devotion, the songs felt labored, but for her third album, Echo the Diamond, Glaspy has trusted her strengths. It’s a commendable reset—and a reminder that making good art needn’t feel like a struggle.
Produced by Glaspy and her husband, the jazz-leaning guitarist and composer Julian Lage, Echo the Diamond features only one fleeting appearance by the synths so prevalent on its predecessor. Instead, the new album homes in on the vibrant instrumental interplay between Glaspy and an accomplished rhythm section of drummer Dave King, best known for his work with the Bad Plus, and bassist Chris Morrissey, who’s played with an eclectic array of artists such as Lucius and Andrew Bird. Glaspy wrote the songs fast, and the musicians made the record in the studio together in three days; some of the finished tracks were first takes, and some were rehearsals. “Climbing uphill doesn’t always equate to things being good,” Glaspy told Paste. “Actually, you can just pick up the things that are right next to you, you can reach inside your own heart and pull out something that’s worthy. You’re allowed to do that.”
The first chunk of Echo the Diamond establishes Glaspy’s return to prickly alt-pop. Opening track “Act Natural,” a playful account of feeling inadequate when meeting someone extraordinary (Glaspy sings, “Is this some kind of butterfly rebirth?/Are you even from this earth?”), brandishes a twisty, wonderfully catchy guitar riff reminiscent of Modest Mouse or MJ Lenderman. “Get Back,” which reclaims the Beatles’ famous dictum as an interior monologue of personal discovery, has a terrific moment where Glaspy holds the last note of the title phrase like Wile E. Coyote bounding over a cliff; she doesn’t look down. She can also be funny: “Don’t be a dick,” Glaspy sneers at the outset of “Female Brain,” which morphs from a litany of petty slights experienced by women to an energizing battle cry with such herky-jerky looseness that it feels like it’s being made up on the spot. What could’ve been heavy-handed instead seems like it could break apart at any moment.
The album’s brash opening turns out to be a Trojan horse for Glaspy’s warm, perceptive songwriting. Perhaps the best song is “Memories,” a waltzing ballad about a source of grief that the artist hasn’t specified in interviews; the ache is so palpable in her voice, creaking like Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker, she doesn’t have to. On “Irish Goodbye,” a midtempo smolderer built around a knotty riff, Glaspy weaves a compelling third-person narrative about a man who doubts himself after forming a connection with a woman who sneaks out of the bar. The song’s quintessential New York City setting has a neat bookend in the languid finale “People Who Talk,” which winds up somewhere with a lively backyard and an intriguing sense of ambivalence; the protagonist may have settled down, but this isn’t happily ever after.
Echo the Diamond can be remarkably inventive within the confines of its narrow lineup and spontaneous origins. The biggest outlier is “Hammer and the Nail,” the only co-write on the album (with contributions from Glaspy’s friend Ryan Lerman), which dips into a jazz standard’s seductive smokiness, albeit with Glaspy’s flickering guitar and sphinx-like ambiguity. There are still times when Glaspy’s lyrics feel effortful. A couplet like, “Oh every conversation between strangers or acquaintances/Only reminds me of how radiant your patience is,” from the successful Alanis Morissette homage “My Eyes,” may strike some listeners as cleverly inspired, and others as simply too clever. But the album resonates as the expression of an overachiever remembering the benefits of working within self-imposed constraints. In that sense, the most representative song might be “Turn the Engine,” a leisurely showcase for some of Glaspy’s most otherworldly, Joni Mitchell-via-Lucinda Williams vocal runs, which doubles as one of the most candid songs I have heard about crippling self-criticism. For anyone who enjoys a thoughtful singer-songwriter record with adept, minimalist instrumental backing and a powerhouse vocalist, Echo the Diamond is a worthy listen. For people who recognize themselves when Glaspy sings about being “back up in my head/Like a needle just passing thread,” it could become an essential companion. | 2023-08-23T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-23T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | August 23, 2023 | 7.7 | 5525c02a-007a-47be-94f4-4ba19bbcf81f | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
The psychedelic mod band were only around for a few years, but as this Numero compilation overwhelmingly proves, they were as self-aware as the Move, as vicious as the Who, and as clever as the Kinks. | The psychedelic mod band were only around for a few years, but as this Numero compilation overwhelmingly proves, they were as self-aware as the Move, as vicious as the Who, and as clever as the Kinks. | The Creation: Action Painting | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22996-action-painting/ | Action Painting | The Creation are the definition of a cult band. They only existed for a brief spell—formed in 1966, fell apart in 1968— but during those months, they bore a sound that could’ve made them stars. Adding to the Creation’s mystique is the fact that they weren’t widely heard at the time. In their native Britain, they eked out only one hit, “Painter Man,” which scraped the Top 40 at No. 36. But that’s better than they managed in the U.S., where they essentially didn't exist; their four singles stiffed and the haphazard 1967 LP We Are Paintermen never even materialized in America.
Eurodisco outfit Boney M took their cover “Painter Man” into the UK Top 10 in 1979, but that had little to do with the cult of the Creation that was already well underway. The first true flowering of Creation awareness arrived in 1978, when the Jam conspicuously framed a Creation 45—“Biff Bang Pow,” the flipside of “Painter Man”—in their collage of inspiration and self-celebration in the inner sleeve for All Mod Cons. By the early ’80s, Television Personalities were covering their songs and the band’s chief advocate Alan McGee formed a label called Creation and named his indie band after “Biff Bang Pow.” Fan devotion doesn’t come much clearer than that.
By that point, Edsel released How Does It Feel To Feel, the first in a series of Creation compilations created for British Invasion, freakbeat and psych collectors. Many similar collections have appeared over the last three decades, but Numero’s new double-disc Action Painting is the first Creation compilation designed to appeal to listeners who might not already know them. It’s for people who may be aware of the band through the indelible impression “Makin' Time” made in Wes Anderson’s 1998 film Rushmore, or perhaps Ride’s cover of “How Does It Feel To Feel” in 1994, or maybe they just trust Numero’s curation of the forgotten corners of our musical past.
Action Painting certainly contains its own collector bait—the first disc includes remasters of the band’s original mono mixes supervised by their producer Shel Talmy, while the second contains all the previously un-reissued early sides the group cut as the Mark Four along with new stereo mixes—but its value is in presenting the work of this extraordinary band in an easily digestible fashion. The sequencing of Action Painting gives their short, turbulent life some coherence, presenting a narrative where the group keeps kicking against the pricks of their time.
For outsiders, Shel Talmy may provide the best gateway to the Creation. Talmy produced the earliest hits of the Kinks and the Who (he’s responsible for the proto-metal blast of “You Really Got Me” and the sneering defiance of “My Generation”) and the Creation benefitted from his blunt touch. On his productions, Talmy ratcheted up the violent pop-art of the Who when they were at the peak of their mod swagger, a move that was only fitting for a band who seemed to exist in an eternal now, simultaneously hoovering up ideas from R&B-besotted mods and mind-bending psychedelia. In that sense, the Creation sometimes flirted with the subversion of the Move, but where Roy Wood often indulged in irony, the Creation were sincere, never raising an arched eyebrow when conjuring waves of noise and grounding their whimsy with truly nasty, gnarled guitar riffs.
The creation existed in a hot house between mod and psychedelia, ranging between the fevered stomp of the former and the mind-warping experimentation of the latter. Listen to “Sylvette,” one of their earliest numbers: it’s essentially a rewrite of Eddie Holland’s “Leaving Here”—notably covered by the Who on their 1965 debut My Generation—but the Creation feels coiled and lethal, as if they were deliberately keeping their full power in check. One of their chief attributes is that they sounded almost vicious.
Innovation never played into the Creation’s legacy. Guitarist Eddie Phillips sawed a violin bow across his six strings, a move Jimmy Page would steal, but the band embodied their time more than transcended it. The feeling that the band was always on the cusp of a breakthrough is what makes them exciting to this day. Particularly in the mono mixes that comprise disc one, they are vibrant and alive, sometimes hinting at the clean lines and big beat of mod, but usually sounding like the bold explosion of pop art. It doesn’t pull you into a cerebral undercurrent the way the best psychedelia does, it just detonates. “Biff Bang Pow” takes its name from comic art—the title suggests the hyper-stylized Batman series of 1966—and it rampages like the Who on a bender and it never makes a play for the head. Even “How Does It Feel To Feel”—a churning circle that suggests psychedelic obsession—pushes brawn over brain.
The Creation arrived just as the British Invasion shook off regimented R&B influences, then they departed just as rock started to get deeper and weirder. Certainly, a band that was pushing wailing organs and keening guitars could’ve survived the prog rock era, but that early lack of success pushed the band into a series of personnel upheavals, eventually dooming the band. Yet, their brief, blazing life is also why they remain captivating: they lived minute to minute, pushing out their best ideas because it was likely they’d never survive to another seven inch. Action Painting reflects this urgency, particularly as the singles pile up one after another on the first disc. Here, the Creation often recall their peers—they’re as vicious as the Who, clever as the Kinks, as self-aware as the Move—but they seem utterly original, a band with the ideas, sound and songs for the big time, but one that never caught the right break. They are blessed and cursed by existing for a flash. | 2017-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Numero Group | March 18, 2017 | 8.7 | 552f5f4c-653b-4c06-a744-5c231c73f6b5 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | null |
Metronomy's latest record strips away any pretense that they are a band, focusing on its sole creator, Joe Mount. The album solidifies his own idiosyncratic brand of standoffish funk. | Metronomy's latest record strips away any pretense that they are a band, focusing on its sole creator, Joe Mount. The album solidifies his own idiosyncratic brand of standoffish funk. | Metronomy: Summer 08 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22060-summer-08/ | Summer 08 | Metronomy's public face has always been a front. Those beautiful bandmates in matching slacks, frolicking in a Michel Gondry video? They rarely appear on the records, which are solely the creations of Devonshire synth obsessive Joe Mount. Their—or, his—fifth album strips away any lingering pretense that this is a band deal. There are no cutesy press shots, and there will be no tour. It’s just Mount, reflecting on the hard-partying summer when his second album Nights Out positioned him on the vanguard of a wave of mostly now-defunct British electro bands. Apparently, it’s the record he's wanted to make for years, but ever-increasing levels of opportunity meant that he kept putting it off in favor of more opulent confections: 2011’s The English Riviera, an understated yacht-rocking record that recast his seaside hometown as a continental pleasure ground, followed by 2014’s analog Love Letters, where some striking singles bobbed among a weak stew of Motown and psych.
Mount cuts one of the most contrary figures in British indie, always pulling back at the moment when he could strike hot. “There’s still the potential to go mainstream coupled with the fact that we probably won’t,” he said recently, which seemed more like a comment on his unwillingness to do so than the basic implausibility of Metronomy unseating Drake from Number 1. The English Riviera was written to assuage Mount's fears that people thought they were “just a ‘modern band’, that anyone could make that kind of music.” The “willfully backward” Love Letters refused to uphold its predecessor's gilded choruses, and Summer 08 mostly eschews traditional songwriting conventions altogether. Instead it harks back to the juddering squelch of Nights Out, using post-acid house synths and rinky-dink drum machines to bridge the alt-pop DNA of Peter Gabriel’s II with classic dance cuts like Adamski’s “Killer.” Mount pens a love letter to his drum machine on the“Buffalo Stance”-indebted “16 Beat,” and he gets Beastie Boys’ turntablist Mix Master Mike in to scratch on “Old Skool,” whose chattering refrain echoes the Shamen’s “Move Any Mountain” and the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian.” Mount strips the fervor from these sounds, inflecting them with frenetic cool.
“Old Skool” in particular outlines Mount’s suspicion of prevailing trends. “Have a party/In the West End/Make some money/Make more money,” he sneers, reliving his jealous antipathy towards his cooler West London peers back in 2008. It fits *Summer 08’*s insular scheme, where Mount pulls away from convention once again, but pushes his voice to the center despite the fact that he's not a natural ringleader. Miles from the odd feebleness of Love Letters, he often sounds antagonistic on the record’s first half: anguished and overcooked on “Miami Logic,” and oozing disdain on opener “Back Together,” where he impersonates a scenester girl reserving them a table “some place really, really good.” His brashness is a tonic, giving his wayward beats a purposeful attitude.
Summer 08 isn’t a people-pleasing record, but if there’s a challenger here to singles like “Heartbreaker,” “The Bay,” and “Love Letters,” it's “Hang Me Out to Dry,” a collaboration with Robyn that’s survived from The English Riviera's cutting-room floor. The Swedish pop star’s carefree demands to be used contrast Mount’s sincerity about falling in love, the tension mounting as the rubbery doppler bass lurches ever closer. It’s the most traditional pop song here, and gives way to the record's softer second half, where Mount allows some of Metronomy’s tropes to ease back in: the syncopated, clacking bass of “My House,” and spacy, Daft Punk-indebted undulating synths on “Night Owl.”
Warmth creeps in on “Love's Not an Obstacle,” but dissipates again on closer “Summer Jam,” where synths loom like cold skyscrapers in a stylized dystopia. Mount repeats a forlorn devotion (“I’d do anything for your love, love”), and the song spends its final 45 seconds in an ambient haze punctured by a rudimentary drum machine echo. It’s a strange, bittersweet note to end on; maybe the memory he’s held onto from this decadent period in his life.
It feels like a good thing that Mount didn’t make this record straight after Nights Out. Back then, it would have seemed too much like another great entry in the annals of Rock Stars Complaining About Success. And in the interim eight years, he’s figured out how to evade pop without skimping on its sensibility, and created enough of a catalogue to solidify his own idiosyncratic brand of standoffish funk. In anyone else’s hands, Summer 08 might seem strange and cold. But from Mount, as ornery as it is, it feels like a gesture of trust. | 2016-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Because Music | July 9, 2016 | 7.2 | 5530c78c-31b2-412c-9c55-7a20396a609d | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Once you understand the 2 Chainz persona, there's no narrative, no room for introspection, no flexibility, nothing beyond the one-dimensional caricature he's crafted on countless other verses. Whether he succeeds or fails on his debut LP, then, relies heavily on how funny you think lines such as, "Go so hard, Viagra try to sign me," really are. | Once you understand the 2 Chainz persona, there's no narrative, no room for introspection, no flexibility, nothing beyond the one-dimensional caricature he's crafted on countless other verses. Whether he succeeds or fails on his debut LP, then, relies heavily on how funny you think lines such as, "Go so hard, Viagra try to sign me," really are. | 2 Chainz: Based on a T.R.U. Story | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17092-based-on-a-tru-story/ | Based on a T.R.U. Story | At this point, the artist formerly known as Tity Boi's unlikely, winding career path has been discussed heavily. The quick rundown: He dropped several albums and one smash hit (which benefited heavily from a peak-era Lil' Wayne hook) as a member of Playaz Circle. He worked as Ludacris' understudy at DTP. He's had his fair share of great music scattered across a career that now touches three different decades of hip-hop history. After building a sudden, cult-like mixtape buzz across the country, his solo debut, Based on a T.R.U. Story, has moved an impressive 147,000 copies, a new industry benchmark of how to shift from mixtapes to sales, and a cynical example of the bare minimum of creativity required for that level of success.
He's released solo mixtapes for several years, but it wasn't until 2010's Me Against the World 2: Codeine Withdrawal and Trap-A-Velli 2: (The Residue) that the spark seemed to find a fuse. These tapes even pre-dated the mainstream-friendly 2 Chainz name transition, and indicated possible new momentum behind what had been an aging franchise; tracks like "Between Me and U" and "Up in Smoke" (a masterful, underrated fusion of Christión's "Full of Smoke" with Art of Noise's "Moments in Love") indicated the rapper had a gift for the hazy afterparty slow jam, in an era when most artists reaching for the brass ring of Atlanta's rap game had to knock out peak-time hits. It's easy to see Tity's presence in Gucci Mane's "Everybody Looking" video as a kind of Styrofoam baton pass; just as Gucci's popular appeal reached a fevered pitch, he returned to prison. He was joined by T.I., hamstrung by repeated probation violations, while Young Jeezy, ready to capitalize off a hot street single, languished in label purgatory. Atlanta and its major hip-hop infrastructure-- the strip clubs, mixtape trade, and tour circuit-- had a star machine to generate revenue with a vacuum in its center. Into the void gawkily sauntered a new hero, who took the path pioneered by 50 Cent, adapted to the internet era by Lil Wayne, and fully fleshed out with three-dimensional songcraft by Gucci Mane.
It's hard to avoid the feeling, particularly on his debut LP, that 2 Chainz is only able to fill those shoes by sheer force of will, rather than anything resembling artistic inspiration. His verses these days consist of blue-collar hip-hop cultural touchpoints (True Religion jeans, eating at Waffle House and Benihana, a general lack of interest in the consumer choices made on Watch the Throne) spit with a few basic rhyme patterns. These are bundled together by punchlines that split the difference between Gucci's effortless nonchalance and Young Money's rib-jabbing hashtag joke style. The gulf between those approaches is deep, yet 2 Chainz manages the tough act of seeming simultaneously disinterested in what he's saying while underlining the joke in the most eyeroll-inducing manner possible. For a dash of character, he occasionally sounds like a true man-out-of-time, with a bit of anachronistic flair reminiscent of Guru from Gang Starr. (The latter once rapped, "like baggy slacks I'm crazy hip-hop"; the former mentions his "True Religion trousers.") But unlike Guru, there's nothing else there; once you understand the basic 2 Chainz persona, there's no narrative, no room for introspection, no flexibility, nothing beyond the one-dimensional caricature he's crafted on countless other verses. Whether he succeeds or fails, then, relies heavily on how funny you think lines such as, "Go so hard, Viagra try to sign me," really are, and ultimately, whether or not he can produce quality songs.
Unlike the rappers who paved the lane he's expanded to fill, 2 Chainz isn't quite as comfortable shifting through the song templates required of a flood-the-market street rapper in 2012. He can still manage the slow-burning afterparty anthem; as recently as last year, Codeine Cowboy's "Feeling You" captured the smoky backroom vibe he'd perfected. With 2011's "Spend It", he passed his most important test by generating a genuine peak-time club hit and even manufacturing one of the year's most incessantly memorable choruses. "Riot", that song's sequel, is included as a bonus track; it is a bit slight in comparison. There's a baseline of consistency to Based on a T.R.U. Story; some of the beats are clearly the best money can buy, from Drumma Boy's intricate "Money Machine" to Mike Will's frequency-filtering "No Lie", a major chart success that likely owes a bulk of its pop presence to Drake's guest verse. Drake and Kanye both seem to think the way to best fit in on 2 Chainz record is to be generally kind of shitty to the women they talk about, which makes each guest spot an obvious choice for their respective highlight reels.
Yet despite his chart success with Drake, many of 2 Chainz' pop maneuvers feel tone-deaf. Typically, The-Dream balances smooth seduction with a tackier lyrical approach by infusing it with an earnest generosity. 2 Chainz is too cynical to make it work: "Dinner dates I demonstrate how to penetrate/ If you ain't with it, it's elimidate." (Rimshot.) Similarly awkward attempts at stitching 2 Chainz to the pop world include Mike Posner collaboration "In Town" and "Countdown", a dubstep-ballad which contains the representative lyrical tangle, "If love is a drug I'm arrested for your possession." Perhaps the worst offender, though, is "Ghetto Dreams": John Legend's clenched-fist vocal performance and Scarface's gravitas serve only to make 2 Chainz' detached, detail-free drug raps seem all the more disconnected from anything resembling an emotional truth. The meat of Based on a T.R.U. Story, then, is songs like "I Luv Dem Strippers", "I'm Different", "Feel Good", and "Like Me" (which contains lyrical chestnut "titty-fuck, CHEST NUT!"). These songs don't seem like major hits per se, but they epitomize his satisfyingly quirky, juvenile triviality. It's a much needed reprieve from the album's other primary color of mild mediocrity. | 2012-08-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-08-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | August 28, 2012 | 4.5 | 5532c1b2-43d0-4035-b361-a5397899b4a6 | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
The pop artist’s second record is a bold attempt at lightening up her sound, featuring a cyber-future narrative and three distinct personas. | The pop artist’s second record is a bold attempt at lightening up her sound, featuring a cyber-future narrative and three distinct personas. | Lolo Zouaï: PLAYGIRL | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lolo-zouai-playgirl/ | PLAYGIRL | Lolo Zouaï’s viral hit “Desert Rose” was a lament for her family, framed in the cultures that raised her. Born to an Algerian father and French mother, the San Francisco-raised singer used English, French, and Arabic to cover the spectrum of emotions that arose when she was banned from attending a family wedding in Algeria. The most subdued track from her laid-back, confident debut, 2019’s High Highs to Low Lows, “Desert Rose” was not just a plaintive cry but also a gentle nudge to reclaim a more assertive and freeing narrative of her life. “Everyday I’m still having to push my boundaries,” she said in an interview earlier this year. “I still feel like a prude sometimes… All of it has just made me want to make happier music now.”
Zouaï’s second album, PLAYGIRL, is a bold attempt at lightening up, centering her dominance and playful swagger even in its weaker moments. Whereas on High Highs to Low Lows she seemed contained to brief, controlled passions, PLAYGIRL flirts openly with relinquishing command: “There’s something about me falling apart/That makes it so easy to sleep in your arms,” she coos in the sinister bounce of “Give Me a Kiss.” With producer Stelios Phili, Zouaï elevates her debut’s screwy trap-pop sound into glitchy hyperpop. On “pl4yg1rl,” she pitches up and interpolates her Bay Area rap idol Too $hort’s “pimpandho.com,” flipping his description of the “dot com whore” into a cyber-dominatrix ruling the metaverse. “You deserve some fun,” she sings, swinging from a coquettish purr to an authoritative demand: “Get your headphones/Lock up the bedroom door/Log on.” Zouaï’s delicate, airy vocals frequently appear in layers of harmony and vocal processors, reverberating within a digital playground that whirls with synths and crackling drum machines. With Phili’s production, they add to a crowded, disorienting state of unreality.
PLAYGIRL is branded as a concept album set in the far off cyber-future, with the music divided into three distinct personas: the flirtatious “Playgirl,” the softer “Dreamgirl,” and the darker “Partygirl.” The album shines when Zouaï is playing and partying, like in the funky, whimsical, “Picking Berries,” a romp in “the south of France” that moves as an extended, breathy sigh. The intoxicating, candy-coated “Gummy Bear” is another highlight, juxtaposing Zouaï’s honeyed speaking voice with floating melodic runs that echo the free-flowing improvisation found in Algerian raï, the anti-fundamentalist and often overtly sexual popular music that formed under French colonial rule.
It’s unclear, however, where exactly each alter-ego falls in the tracklist. PLAYGIRL isn’t as dynamic as it needs to be to make those distinctions clear. The back half in particular, with its slew of reductive acoustic ballads and bland R&B crooners, can feel like abruptly taking off your VR headset. These are welcome breathers amid PLAYGIRL’s hyper-digital overload, but Zouaï isn’t comfortable when she tries to add more power to her voice, making tracks like “Open the Door” sound more like throwaway Kehlani demos.
When Zouaï takes the edge off her vocals, the music eases up with her. The slow-building “Skin & Bones” acts like a successor to “High Highs to Low Lows”—the single that kick-started her career—with its frank discussion of depression and the downsides of the industry success she sought for so long. “Holding back tears during my shows,” she reflects with a softness that situates those struggles firmly in the past. “I’m done living in my head,” she sings in the bridge, repeating the phrase through drifting echoes, then centering her voice in vocal runs that crescendo with ease. These feathery touches are Zouaï at her best. When she’s able to riff and improvise, she sounds as though her voice is fluttering toward happier moments, spiraling upward and evaporating into a whisper. | 2022-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Keep It on the Lolo / RCA | October 21, 2022 | 6.7 | 5534e04c-5b92-4f4f-b110-d0d6af0a4ce2 | Rachel Saywitz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachel-saywitz/ | |
A 10-minute EP presents an ambitious solo exploration of hocketing, a musical technique with a long and curious history. | A 10-minute EP presents an ambitious solo exploration of hocketing, a musical technique with a long and curious history. | Meara O’Reilly: Hockets for Two Voices EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meara-oreilly-hockets-for-two-voices-ep/ | Hockets for Two Voices EP | In the 14th century, Pope John XXII weighed in on music. In his Docta sanctorum patrum of 1324-25, he declared that notes of “small values” disturbed the recitation of prayers and distracted worshippers from true devotion. The target of his disdain was hocketing, a musical technique that involves splitting a single melody into brief phrases and dividing each phrase between several voices or instruments. As each part alternates, the rapid back-and-forth exchange creates a complete melody. Nearly 700 years later, Hockets for Two Voices, a 10-minute, seven-movement EP by Los Angeles composer, artist, and instrument designer Meara O’Reilly, suggests there’s still something mystical about hockets.
Hocketing’s name comes from the French word “hoquet,” or “hiccup.” Though it’s frequently associated with sacred songs of the European Middle Ages, the rhythmic practice originated in African vocal and instrumental traditions. Today, hocketing remains a popular—though ambitious—vocal or instrumental approach. This sustained, carefully rehearsed game of musical ping-pong can be found across contemporary genres, from modern classical to funk to indie rock. Meredith Monk has used the technique to create a complex vocal balancing act; Dirty Projectors’ David Longstreth is an exceptionally passionate fan of hockets and frequently employs chirping, call-and-response vocal arrangements. The proliferation of hocketing across time and culture, from Balinese gamelan to Ghanian flutes to medieval motets, illustrates its universal appeal.
O’Reilly’s interest in hockets began with a fascination with auditory perception. Drawing on her experience co-creating an app that uses 2-D geometry to generate rhythm patterns and designing visuals for Björk’s Biophilia tour based on the songs’ basslines, she considered the historical use of hocketing and decided to push the format further. O’Reilly was particularly captivated by the work of psychoacoustic researcher Albert Bregman, who studied how people perceive sound. Though Hockets for Two Voices has no production and never more than two notes at a time, the precise arrangement of O’Reilly’s compositions creates the illusion of a wide, vibrant palette, a trompe-l’oreille known as pseudo-polyphony. The separation of her voice in stereo also establishes a spatial relationship, shifting the experience depending where you place your attention.
But Hockets for Two Voices is also an experiment in performance. Hockets are intended to be produced by two or more individuals or instruments. O’Reilly’s decision to record Hockets for Two Voices alone turns it into an endurance piece. Over the course of a year, she painstakingly trained her vocal cords to jump to sharp new heights, then carefully cobbled each part together. The result is so exact in tone and pitch that it initially comes off as artificial. But as your ears adjust to the pattern, the swift popping of O’Reilly’s voice becomes more intricate and organic, like a cluster of bursting bubbles. Though Hockets for Two Voices is a small record, it invites us to investigate the endless potential of our individual perception. | 2019-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Cantaloupe | November 23, 2019 | 7.4 | 5537f299-94fe-45e4-84bb-b04cf68c78a9 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Tamara Lindeman’s songwriting has reached stunning new heights. With a full band supporting her, her new album draws upon the natural world to create unforgettable moments of calm and beauty. | Tamara Lindeman’s songwriting has reached stunning new heights. With a full band supporting her, her new album draws upon the natural world to create unforgettable moments of calm and beauty. | The Weather Station: Ignorance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-weather-station-ignorance/ | Ignorance | Because her lyrics are often the focus, and because the accompanying music could most succinctly be described as “folk,” Tamara Lindeman has a singing voice that is easy to overlook. But it is where much of her power lies. The 36-year-old songwriter and former child actress from Toronto is not the kind of singer who demands your attention but the type who doesn’t seem to care whether you’re listening at all: Dipping between her hushed lower register and a breezy falsetto, her delivery flows as an internal monologue. By listening closely, you are sharing her headspace, invited into a private world. Her songs are anthems for those of us accustomed to spending long stretches of time in silence, or being asked repeatedly “What are you thinking about?”
This introverted style has suited Lindeman’s work as the Weather Station, a project that has evolved over the past decade from sparse solo recordings into an ambitious full band with frequent string accompaniment. In a pivotal song called “Thirty” from 2017’s self-titled album, Lindeman fully assumed the role of bandleader. Without sacrificing the acute, observational detail of her early work, it felt like a breakthrough. Her voice became impossible to ignore. “I noticed fucking everything—the light, the reflections, different languages, your expressions,” she sang with desperate anxiety, as if speeding through her usual landmarks to set a foothold somewhere new.
On Ignorance, the Weather Station’s dazzling fifth album, Lindeman arrives. The sound of her band—which now includes two drummers, a saxophonist, and a watercolor smear of synth, strings, flute, bass, and electric guitar—has never felt more versatile or distinctive, like an array of set pieces she rearranges to accompany each individual story. She sets the scene with “Robber,” the creeping, jazzy opener whose lyrics unveil a stirring metaphor about the failures of capitalism. As the band leans in conspiratorially, responding to each subtle shift in her delivery, Lindeman shapeshifts from consoler (“No, the robber don’t hate you”) to confessor (“When I was young, I learned how to make love to the robber”) to a strange kind of preacher (“Hold open the gates for the want of lust”). It is a whirlwind performance. As the music skitters and bursts in every direction, she never loses her cool.
Co-produced with Marcus Paquin, Ignorance reimagines Lindeman’s place within her own music and the scope of her project as a whole. Every moment feels lush and welcoming, designed to reach as many people as possible. Ironically, Lindeman wrote many of the songs alone with just an old keyboard, playing along to its rudimentary drum loops. In some songs, like “Separated,” you can hear their humble beginnings: the deft, ambling rhythm of her fingerpicking is replaced with pulsing major chords; her lyrics, which once spilled into the margins with asides and scene directions, arrive in pared-down cycles of verse, swapping a few words while maintaining the general structure: “Separated by the relief you want to feel,” she sings, shortly followed by, “Separated by the belief this cut would heal.”
Lindeman has hinted at these pop ambitions before—her 2017 single “Kept It All to Myself” felt like a first step in this direction—but she has never embraced the sound so fully. After operating within the ’70s idiom of singer-songwriter music, she now looks to the carefully constructed art-pop of the ’80s for inspiration, finding a balance that feels both intuitive and daring. In a late-album highlight called “Heart,” she sings over an aerodynamic rhythm, her falsetto swooping between each substratum of percussion like a small bird navigating the floors of a mansion. It is a rare moment in her songbook where you can tune out the lyrics and just get lost in the music. In fact, Lindeman herself does precisely that in the final moments, humming a wordless refrain as her band glides along.
This is a new trick at Lindeman’s disposal—these appeals to the instant pleasure centers of rhythm and melody—and she can break the spell just as effectively as she casts it. “I tried to wear the world like some kind of garment,” she sings starkly in “Wear,” the first moment on the album where her voice sounds truly unaccompanied, with a ticking drumbeat and high, dissonant piano chord dissolving beneath it. In songs like these, she accesses the same vulnerability that coursed through early albums like Loyalty. Only now, the quiet arrives more sporadically: dusky, old hiding places she leads us through on an otherwise colorful journey.
In the time since the Weather Station’s last album, Lindeman devoted herself to studying the climate crisis, attending town halls and leading panel discussions with fellow musicians and activists in Toronto. In a 2019 interview, she explained the similarities between these conversations and her work as a songwriter: The same way she noticed how her subtle, uncluttered music about intimate subjects could have a therapeutic effect on listeners, she sought to address what’s known as “climate grief” with a sense of compassion, discussing the severity of the facts without ignoring the emotional weight.
Throughout Ignorance, she suggests the first step is rejecting cynicism. It is a goal she shares with Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering, whose 2019 album Titanic Rising found beauty in similarly heavy subject matter. But where Mering’s approach involved zooming out to address our problems on a cosmic scale, Lindeman takes the opposite perspective, burrowing into quiet scenes and passing feelings until they seem to hold universal significance. Plenty of us, for example, may have thoughts like the ones in “Atlantic” (“I should get all this dying off of my mind/I should know better than to read the headlines”). But generational exhaustion is not the point. Instead, Lindeman paints an idyllic portrait, full of wonder, with a glass of wine in her hand: “My god,” go the opening lines. “I thought, ‘What a sunset.’”
As if leading a guided meditation, Lindeman continually turns our focus to the natural world—but her findings aren’t always so picturesque. She has referred to “Parking Lot” as a “love song for a bird,” and, for the most part, that’s what it is. Standing outside a venue before a show, and on the verge of what sounds like a minor breakdown, she notices a small bird flying around the parking lot. And so she stops to admire it. “Is it alright if I don’t want to sing tonight?” she asks, as if sensing an omen. There’s a metaphor here: the helplessness, the aimlessness, the clash between subject and setting, the quiet singing against the droning traffic. Lindeman has spent her career pondering these connections, pausing in the moments when other people are restlessly pushing forward. Her writing throughout Ignorance can feel like the collected epiphanies from a lifetime of observing.
And sometimes, language fails her. In the last 90 seconds of the song, she gets hung up on the opening words of a sentence: “It kills me when I....” The band anticipates a climax: A string section summons a “Cloudbusting” sense of drama; a disco beat dances from hi-hat to snare with increasing intensity. I swear I hear a choir buried in the mix. Meanwhile, Lindeman takes another stab at the thought: “You know it just kills me when I…” Eventually, she finishes the sentence. Her mind returns to the bird, the band settles down, and life, as we know it, goes on: its constant hum of worry, a sea of cars, another show to play. But for that moment, it was all up in the air.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Fat Possum | February 5, 2021 | 9 | 55383a99-2b57-4d01-b9a7-6bb7413c9701 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Ishmael Butler’s free-form hip-hop project continues to defy convention with a pair of companion albums that view contemporary America as though it were a strange and hostile planet. | Ishmael Butler’s free-form hip-hop project continues to defy convention with a pair of companion albums that view contemporary America as though it were a strange and hostile planet. | Shabazz Palaces: Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star / Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shabazz-palaces-quazarz-born-on-a-gangster-star-quazarz-vs-the-jealous-machines/ | Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star / Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines | Ishmael Butler’s Shabazz Palaces project has always occupied another plane, his discordant sounds and bizarro abstract lyrics just close enough to the familiar to spur intense cognitive dissonance. The music Butler makes with Tendai Maraire is avant-garde but undeniably focused: free-jazz rap made with samplers, sequencers, and drum machines. Distinctly informed by blackness and the black experience, it nonetheless has defied any previously constructed conventions, an awkward fit for any box you might try to squeeze it into.
Their latest records, the simultaneously released Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines and Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star, are their most direct attempt at universe-building, with Butler playing the part of the protagonist Quazarz, a “sent sentient from some elsewhere” who navigates “Amurderca” on the “Gangster Star”—dystopian parallel versions of the country and the planet that feel as familiar as they are terrifying (“We post-language, baby, we talk with guns,” he raps on “Welcome to Quazarz”). More than ever, signifiers of the “real” world serve to ground both records in a baseline reality, like the Central Area Youth Association rec center Butler once frequented (“Since C.A.Y.A.”) or the Xanax glow of “your favorite rapper” (“30 Clip Extension”).
Jealous Machines and Gangster Star feel even more connected than the last double release—the debut EPs Of Light and Shabazz Palaces—but they represent different modes of creation. Butler honed Jealous Machines with the producer Sunny Levine over periodic trips to Southern California stretched out over months; Gangster Star was banged out back home in Seattle with Erik Blood over two weeks in 2016, when intended bonus tracks evolved into a complete album.
When Butler first introduced himself as the Palaceer Lazaro, his collaborators were obfuscated and shrouded in mystery; as his star has risen, those collaborations have become more visible. Butler is still the heart of Shabazz Palaces, but their aesthetic is heavily influenced by the Black Constellation, a multi-disciplinary art collective of like-minded astral travelers. From the guest appearances to the videos—even the clothes they wear when they perform—the current iteration of Shabazz Palaces is clearly informed by this collection of stars.
Gangster Star reads like Butler’s version of a memoir: his experience as an extraterrestrial being deposited on a hostile planet. Jealous Machines nods to the symbiotic relationships we develop with the various black mirrors in our lives. They’re extensions of ourselves, and when we’re not on one, we’re often thinking about it, the machine calling out to us in its absence, like a needy lover that wants your attention and isn’t getting it. With Jealous Machines, Butler and Maraire reject both the device “and the guilds that proliferate them,” corporations that feed on the life force we pour into the machines that we’ve assimilated into our bodies. Less Luddite screed than cautionary tale, Jealous Machines resists the human detachment we so often correlated with our digital connections.
Part of what makes Shabazz Palaces so compelling has been their refusal to assign too much meaning to their work, preferring instead to invite their audience to make its own connections and draw its own conclusions. That proves more difficult with the often quite specific prog-rock space-opera narrative of these two albums, but the free-jazz vibe still makes for a visceral experience, regardless of whether not you can actually follow Quazarz’ path. They continue to eschew standard song structures in favor of free-flowing compositions whose direction is guided by instinct.
Butler once admitted to NPR that when he’s writing and recording, he’s not wholly concerned with the specifics of his intention: A line will come to him, he’ll record it, and later, when he listens back, he’ll have no clue where it came from. Improvisation is crucial to their process; they capture impulse on record, and crucially, have the confidence to let that raw expression stand. They strike a dichotomous balance of opposing feelings: joy and pain, relaxation and tension, staring at the stars with two feet planted firmly on the ground.
After four records, it would be foolish to expect any sort of formula from Shabazz Palaces. The closest analogue to the off-kilter rhythms and shifting time signatures might be El-P’s hallucinogenic panic-attack production, or the cosmic vibes of the Brainfeeder label, but Butler’s group has always felt shockingly unique. This time around, the edges of the Quazarz universe feel smoother, the ride less jarring. The low end is still intense, but it feels more like a deep tissue massage than a trunk-rattling rumble. They’re still manipulating vocal samples into space-age instruments (“Parallax”) but you won’t hear much of Maraire’s mbira, and even the syncopated rhythms feel staid and conventional. It’s quite possibly the most accessible and coherent music in the group’s catalog, but somehow the toned-down levels of weird feel disappointing.
Still, Gangster Star and Jealous Machines are essential counter-programming against the indoctrination of the screen-based economy—and a refreshing example of art and expression wholly unconcerned with convention. Butler has always attacked lesser rappers, daring them to elevate their art; his forceful confidence is meant to challenge “your favorite rapper” to push their own boundaries, to re-think just why they do things the way they’ve been done. Because to follow the path most traveled is to maintain the status quo, one both regressive and actively oppressive. And if you’re comfortable with the status quo of “Amurderca,” what exactly does that say about you? | 2017-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | null | July 14, 2017 | 7.6 | 553b71c6-5c04-4286-af9e-5ccbe73e57bb | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | null |
On an adventurous new album, the New York hardcore band populates a swamp of chugs with weird creatures of electronica and sudden clearings of melodic, galloping punk. | On an adventurous new album, the New York hardcore band populates a swamp of chugs with weird creatures of electronica and sudden clearings of melodic, galloping punk. | Show Me the Body: *Trouble the Water * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/show-me-the-body-trouble-the-water/ | Trouble the Water | I saw Corpus, the label formed around New York hardcore punk band Show Me the Body, participate in the Red Bull Culture Clash in Brooklyn earlier this year. It’s a corporate event modeled on dancehall soundclash culture, where crews of musicians face off on opposing stages. From one corner of the Greenpoint venue Warsaw, one of Corpus’ opponents, the DJ collective Half Moon, proclaimed that they “represent Brooklyn. The real Brooklyn.” Taunts are part of the sportsmanship of a soundclash, but this one struck a nerve—on Corpus’ next turn, one of the label’s crew responded with an emphatic “Suck my dick!” This is an old problem for Corpus, Show Me the Body, and a lot of artists in New York: How weird can they get before they’re no longer “real”? How close to dance music will Show Me the Body be allowed to come before Redditors curl their lips?
On Trouble the Water, Show Me the Body’s third full-length album, their experimentations often strike gold. The band’s daring pays off when vocalist Julian Cashwan Pratt breaks his voice wide open on tracks that dig into sounds that are firsts for the band, and consummate what were previously flirtations with dance music. On “Radiator,” a single chanted refrain of “Don’t it make you wanna go home?” with double-tracked vocals calls up the Ramones. The band pairs the look at punk’s past with one from its future, overlaying the whole track with an incessant synthesizer belch. Whereas on their previous full-length, 2019’s Dog Whistle, they leaned primarily on their proficiency for creating menacing atmosphere, throughout Trouble the Water, the band populates what might otherwise be a swamp of chugs with weird creatures of electronica and sudden clearings of melodic, galloping punk. On “Demeanor” and “Using It,” they switch between hardcore and noise, sometimes fluidly, sometimes abruptly; press materials attribute the glitchy textures to bassist Harlan Steed. “I wanna feel what I’ve never felt before,” Pratt growls over “Demeanor.” Yes!
Trouble the Water is also a showcase for Pratt’s expanding talents as a vocalist and a lyricist. He roars, shrieks, leers: On “Food From Plate,” he breaks suddenly from a credible death-metal bark to a light chuckle. Right after “They think it’s sweet” in his trademark snarl on “War Not Beef” comes “They think it’s e-e-easy” in a mocking falsetto, before the tempo hikes and the track tumbles forward in double time. He is a shapeshifter, becoming a different entity nearly every second. The first half of “WW4” is melancholy, and by the end, the very same lyrics are a martial chant.
The waging of war is a consistent concern on Trouble the Water. “They don’t belong here!” Pratt spits on the chorus of lead single “We Came to Play,” and “I don’t regret violence” on opening track “Loose Talk.” Gentrification and a fierce hostility to the changing New York remain a lyrical focus. I think this disposition reveals why Show Me the Body find it more difficult to shake off sneers like the ones thrown at them at Warsaw, aimed at their authenticity. When you wield the double-edged sword of Not Fucking With Certain Shit, you can get cut: laughed at for cringey interviews or called assholes for swatting phones out of the hands of the audience. Show Me the Body are in the arena, where they choose to be, where they belong. Here, you can’t get by being a guy who everyone likes. You have to be really fucking good. | 2022-10-31T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-31T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | October 31, 2022 | 7.8 | 5540c3b2-856d-410f-8b81-85b2699d7da1 | Adlan Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adlan-jackson/ | |
The Swedish electronic artist Vanbot and two collaborators made this new album while journeying along the Trans-Siberian Railway—but they can’t quite sustain its immersive mood. | The Swedish electronic artist Vanbot and two collaborators made this new album while journeying along the Trans-Siberian Railway—but they can’t quite sustain its immersive mood. | Vanbot: Siberia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23098-siberia/ | Siberia | You can make music anywhere these days. Laptops can pack in all the audio-processing power of a high-end studio. Singers can roll over in bed, reach for their smartphone, and record a fleeting melody before the cobwebs have cleared; techno producers can bang out a beat on their tablet while they’re sitting on the can. Electronic music’s mobile recording methods have spawned an entire mini-genre of photographs depicting EDM producers peering purposefully at Ableton while in transit. But why stop there? For musicians of a more bohemian stripe, why not get off the grid entirely?
That’s the premise of the Swedish electronic musician Vanbot’s third album, Siberia. Gripped by the desire to break out of her routine, Vanbot—born Ester Ideskog—and two collaborators boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway in Moscow. Seventeen days later, they disembarked in Beijing with a bunch of dirty socks in their suitcases and a newly completed album on their hard drives. Everything that we hear on Siberia was written and recorded in their train compartment and at various stops along the way; to preserve the integrity of the project’s constraints, they opted not to do any additional recording upon their return to Sweden.
It must have been a hell of a trip. A short video documents the blurry romance of the 4,735-mile journey: lonely birch forests glimpsed through rain-streaked windows; waves lapping against Lake Baikal’s stony shore; horseback riding on the Mongolian steppes. Little of that actually comes through in the music, however. With the exception of the occasional moment of muted train noise snaking through the background, there are few clues to the context of the album’s creation aside from the place names used as subtitles: “On the Fly (Omsk),” “Collide (Krasnoyarsk),” etc.
Still, that’s logical—after all, a Matthew Herbert-style audio collage patched together out of clattering rails and shrieking train whistles could have been unbearably ponderous. And the record, which strikes a balance between electro-pop and more abstracted soundscapes, begins promisingly enough; “Not That Kind (Moscow)” weaves an appealingly mysterious spell, rocking and swaying with a gentle, hypnotic motion. The syncopated beat recalls Apparat’s crunchy machine percussion, and suggestive little details—a burst of clarinet, a squiggle of analog noise—break briefly through the echo-soaked haze and disappear just as swiftly, like flashes of human life glimpsed in the passing taiga.
But Ideskog and her collaborators can’t quite sustain that immersive mood. Perhaps that’s because they’re trying too hard to capture rail travel’s extended sensation of suspended reality, all those fleeting emotions of days and nights in constant motion. Tempos across the album tend to linger somewhere between andante and plodding; everything, from the synths to the electronic drums to Ideskog’s own breathy soprano, swims in a fog of echo and distortion. There are moments of interest along the way. The instrumental “Yekaterinburg” is intriguingly dreamlike, its wheezing organs evocative of a faded carousel. “Louder (Ulan-Ude)” is an appealingly wistful take on dream-pop power balladry, part M83 and part “Take My Breath Away.” But the album’s omnipresent haze of yearning never gives way to any more specific emotions, and Ideskog’s vague lyrical conceits—“Stay with me”; “Get lost and found/To float not drown”; “I didn’t mean to hurt you, no”—never quite measure up to the magnitude of the scenery around her.
As it happens, Vanbot’s isn’t the first album made along the same route. The French musician Thylacine undertook a remarkably similar project on his 2016 album Transsiberian, and his album is, if anything, even more unfocused. He goes to more effort to weave field recordings into his compositions, but there’s a fundamental disconnect between his melodic progressive house and the folk music he captures along the way. Vanbot, at least, stay true to their own muddled mood, and on “Close Enough (Ulan Bator),” samples of an encounter with Mongolian musicians are left as fuzzy as the remnants of the previous night’s dream. Throughout the album, Ideskog’s lyrics are preoccupied with ideas of distance and separation; at the album’s climax she sings, over and over, “I can’t get close enough,” as though all too aware of the gulf between her and the world whipping past the window. In his 1978 novel Picture Palace, Paul Theroux observes, “Travel is the saddest of pleasures,” adding, “It gave me eyes.” *Siberia *faithfully captures the wistfulness of the pilgrim’s journey—but it also suggests that the ears may be fickle traveling companions. | 2017-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Lisch / Sony Music Sweden | April 12, 2017 | 6 | 5542ebe7-8b71-4348-adca-3b9c5acfe34c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
A live recording from 2016 captures the avant-rock titans jamming on the edge of oblivion. | A live recording from 2016 captures the avant-rock titans jamming on the edge of oblivion. | Keiji Haino / Charles Hayward: A Loss Permitted... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/keiji-haino-charles-hayward-a-loss-permitted/ | A Loss Permitted | Keiji Haino and Charles Hayward have spent decades twisting through rock’s byways, slipping between the cracks of punk, noise, free improv, prog, music concrete, and on and on. If the rock pantheon’s ur-texts valorize righteous authenticity, Dyonisian sexual liberation, and noodly virtuosity, these two are undaunted inversions, Jungian shadows to that mainstream triumphant myth. You can identify either of them in an instant. In the case of Hayward, a founding member of This Heat, it’s that deep, British melancholy that floats somewhere between the looming apocalypse and something unknowably personal. For Haino, it doesn’t matter what instrument he finds himself on—guitar, vocals, hurdy-gurdy—everything comes out blazing with a stark, quasi-demonic spiritual force. In their hands, the basic tenets of rock music become a vessel for something more tectonic.
A Loss Permitted, recorded live in 2016, finds the two jamming on the edge of oblivion. From the go, the session is defined by a whisper/roar contrast, with Haino’s guitar slicing near total silence with darting serrations. Caked in reverb, his initial volleys feel like decayed transmissions from a distant realm, both urgent and remote. Without wasting any time, he stretches far out to one edge of the spectrum, as if to alert you to the violence which looms behind every moment of restraint.
The duo then quickly starts messing with understated atonal gestures, which initially come off a touch rote. These function as a kind of window dressing for the more shattering forays to come, as if Haino and Hayward want to sketch some mountains in the background of their otherwise starkly contrasting landscape. The interplay is loose but confident, using some of the 20th century’s most well-worn avant cliches to help them along.
Haino spends a not insignificant portion of the session on the mic—singing, wailing, and convulsing in Japanese. His yowl at the opening of track 10 lands somewhere between Iggy’s feral bellows on Fun House and the more guttural invocations of death metal. Set against a backdrop of the lightest feedback and some very occasional punctuations from Hayward, it makes for one of the more unsettling and riveting passages, especially when he descends into a hissing whisper. There’s something inhuman about Haino’s throat-shredding cries, something beyond emotion. They don’t translate to anything as pedestrian as anger, anxiety, or pain so much as their own sonic necessity. Performers often describe themselves as channels for some greater force; listening to Haino draw out a piercingly high octave and then descend into writhing death throes might be as direct an expression of this idea as you could hope to find.
They aren’t on fire the whole time. There are sloppy passages and moments when they’re caught rummaging around just long enough for momentum to flag. The piano that winds through the set feels, at times, like a warmed-up leftover from the early-1970s European improv scene. But they always seem to pull it through, often led by Haino’s unabashed theartrics. His seething incantations, accompanied by otherworldly feedback groans, usher in a vital final run somewhere around the 30 minute mark. You can feel the energy coalesce, the players suddenly coursing with energy, like a pair of large cats prowling the stage.
The album closes with ethereal upper-register drones and a last dash of piano. Haino has stepped away from the microphone, but we can hear his cries in the distance, like a hermit wandering into the woods. A lonesome motif is sketched out on the keys, Haino lets out one last wail, and suddenly, mid-moment, the music evaporates. The last 20 seconds of the album are silent. You might expect applause, a “thank you” from Hayward, one last crescendo—anything, really, to let you know it was over. This moment may be the most affecting on the LP, the moment of uncertain dangling on the edge of a void. That’s where they took you, and that’s where they leave you. | 2019-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Thirty Three Thirty Three | July 3, 2019 | 6.9 | 5545d0cf-0eff-4856-833d-cb6de2952dc9 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
On Strange Mercy, Annie Clark ditches Marry Me's naivety and Actor's ostentatious arrangements, boosts the inventive guitar playing, and ends up with her most potent and cathartic release yet. | On Strange Mercy, Annie Clark ditches Marry Me's naivety and Actor's ostentatious arrangements, boosts the inventive guitar playing, and ends up with her most potent and cathartic release yet. | St. Vincent: Strange Mercy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15813-strange-mercy/ | Strange Mercy | Directed by French New Wave great Éric Rohmer, 1972's Chloe in the Afternoon tells of a man caught between fidelity and a stylish old friend named Chloe, who usually pops up at his office after lunch. But just when it looks like the two are going to consummate their affair, the husband is struck with a crisis of conscience and runs back home to his wife. The opening track on Annie Clark's third album as St. Vincent is also called "Chloe in the Afternoon", and while Clark has acknowledged the influence of Rohmer's film on the song, she takes the story to a darker, more dominatrix-y place. In her telling, Chloe carries a "black lacquered horse-hair whip," and, presumably, is paid to use it on white-collar exhibitionists looking for a sadistic tea-time fix. Clark's monstrously corroded guitar riff stands in for the bruised skin and wincing faces; it's hard to tell if she's singing as the person wearing heels or the person being stepped on with them, and that's most definitely the point.
Across three albums, the Dallas native has become a master of subverting her picture-perfectness with violence, rage, and mystery-- "I'll make you sorry," sang Clark in creepy lullaby tones on the very first song on her debut album. The juxtaposition is naturally intriguing, a sophisticated twist on finding out that the horror-movie killer was actually the girl next door all along. "Physically, I'm a very demure-looking person," Clark said in a recent Pitchfork interview, "but I certainly have as much aggression or anger as the next person, and that's got to come out somehow." On her fine, art-rocking debut, Marry Me, those feelings of hurt, loss, and bloodlust could translate a tad cutesy. (On new track "Cheerleader", the lines, "I've played dumb when I knew better/ Tried too hard just to be clever," sound more self-consciously frank than usual.) Follow-up Actor found Clark over-embellishing at times, adding superfluous strings and flutes that often muddied her message.
But Clark's recent live Big Black covers saw her taking the pretty/ugly contrast to raw new levels: "I think I fucked your girlfriend once, maybe twice," she sang, fervently, on "Bad Penny", "I fucked all your friends' girlfriends-- now they hate you!" And anyone who's seen the Berklee dropout do her seizured duckwalk in concert while soloing on unhinged tracks like "Your Lips Are Red" knows her not-so-secret weapon is a lurching guitar style somewhere between Robert Fripp's sheet-metal prog and Tom Morello's 10-ton riffage. On Strange Mercy, she ditches Marry Me's naivety and Actor's ostentatious arrangements, boosts the inventive guitar playing, and ends up with her most potent and cathartic release yet.
Some tracks build like a hot kettle, puffing out ragged smoke in the form of instrumental curlicues. "Surgeon" finds Clark zonked, despondent, paralyzed. "Turn off the TV, wade in bed, a blue and a red, a little something to get along," she sings, "best, finest surgeon, come cut me open." And soon enough, the song revives itself with a bursting synth freak-out courtesy of gospel keyboardist Bobby Sparks. "Cheerleader" breaks on its enormous hook, with Clark singing, "I, I, I, I, I don't wanna be a cheerleader no more," each "I" pounding down hard, emphatically stating its independence. And it's Clark's manic guitar-- sounding like exploding radio static-- that cuts through a relationship's indecisive fickleness on "Northern Lights". On that song, she sings, "Gotta get young fast gotta get young quick/ Gotta make this last if it makes me sick," and the topic of aging and lost youth is brought up several times on the album.
At 28, Clark seems to be sorting through her own existential artistic dilemmas. A champagne year is supposed to be celebrated when you turn the same age as the day you were born, but "Champagne Year" finds the singer-- born September 28, 1982-- in a decidedly non-bottle-popping mood. Her voice takes on a gorgeous creak on the nebulous ballad, as she sings, "I make a living telling people what they wanna hear/ It's not a killing but it's enough to keep the cobwebs clear." An almost-30 indie musician's lament? Perhaps. Meanwhile, the galloping "Hysterical Strength" employs some magical thinking while dealing with death. When Clark isn't bulldozing through time and space with her fretwork, she's contemplating her place with care. The balance is something to behold.
While Strange Mercy's more propulsive workouts-- including the single "Cruel", Clark's purest pop song to date-- are quick to snag attention, the slow burners hit just as heavily. The playful "Dilettante" combines the mutant funk of David Bowie's "Fashion" with the understated genius of D'Angelo's Voodoo, and has Clark possibly propositioning a prophet: "Oh, Elijah, don't make me wait/ What is so pressing that you can't undress me, anyway?" Closer "Year of the Tiger" is a stark summation of end-times capitalism in a recession-stuck United States. Sounding like a Wall Street swindler, she slithers, "Italian shoes like these rubes know the difference/ Suitcase of cash in the back of my stick-shift... Oh America, can I owe you one?" And the delicate title track involves a child, a father stuck behind prison glass, and a breaking point in the form of a refrain: "If I ever meet the dirty policeman who roughed you up, no I don't know what." Her threat here is not a gimmick or a subversion; it's irrational, confused, and real.
Specific names (Chloe, Elijah) and times ("Year of the Tiger", "Champagne Year") give the sense that Strange Mercy exists in its own universe. As does its music, which skips through art-rock touchstones from Talking Heads to Kate Bush to Peter Gabriel without relinquishing a bit of its originality. After all, those artists were trying to create new sounds, an ever-more-difficult task in a culture steeped in its own detritus. Here, Clark's role-playing is grounded in emotions that are as cryptic as they are genuine and affecting. And when her voice can't bear it, her guitar does the screaming. | 2011-09-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-09-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | September 13, 2011 | 9 | 554ba026-f20a-4c4a-90fe-8e15821ae5f3 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Resurrecting a strand of mid-2000s New York hip-hop built on tightly wound samples and a reduced emphasis on bass, Purple Haze 2 is forged in the spirit of the original. | Resurrecting a strand of mid-2000s New York hip-hop built on tightly wound samples and a reduced emphasis on bass, Purple Haze 2 is forged in the spirit of the original. | Cam’ron: Purple Haze 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/camron-purple-haze-2/ | Purple Haze 2 | Cam’ron’s career hit its zenith with Purple Haze. Take it from the man himself, who regularly calls it his greatest album. And with good reason: Purple Haze fully realized the joy of Cam’s idiosyncratic humor, dadaist impulses, and high-fashion fantasies. A decade and a half on from its release, it remains the purest distillation of the rapper’s polychromatic vision of Harlem.
Can Cam’ron can still cut it at that level? His output has slowed, and his last major outing was on 2018’s dismal Dipset record Diplomatic Ties. Sure, Cam has talked up a Purple Haze sequel for years, but it’s not unreasonable to wonder if the 43-year-old just stamped the title onto these 16 tracks to puff up interest in his new music. Fear not—Purple Haze 2 is very much forged in the spirit of the original. Resurrecting a strand of mid-2000s New York hip-hop built on tightly wound samples and a reduced emphasis on bass, the record has little interest in chasing modern rap trends. And while it doesn’t take a laryngologist to tell that Cam’s voice has thickened over the years, his flow finds a smooth pocket and his writing is as solid as it’s been in ages.
Cam works hard to evoke the spirit of his opus from the opening bell. Long-time collaborators the Heatmakerz build “Toast to Me” around a vocal loop and crashing drums as the star allows his knotty writing style and boundless references to run wild. Here, Cam pays homage to Harlem hoodlum Rich Porter, compares his driveway to the Golden State Warriors’ championship run because his cars sit “back-to-back,” and criticizes the American healthcare system (“Doctors, insurance, nah, they can’t afford all that/One day you’ll be coughin’, next week you in a coffin, Jack”). If nothing else, Purple Haze 2 proves Cam’ron’s brain still doesn’t operate like that of any other rapper.
As has often been the case in recent years, Cam’s lyrics skew more towards the autobiographical than the surreal. It’s fun hearing him reminisce about his 2003 appearance on The O’Reilly Factor and gleeful “I got dirt on you doggy” taunts of its host. But more revealing are his ruminations on his early life. Over the nostalgic piano chords of “Losin’ Weight 3,” Cam revisits himself as a 14-year-old determined to buy his grandmother a washing machine. When local drug dealers who admire his basketball skills refuse to recruit him into their operation, Cam and a friend instead rob a couple at gunpoint and lie to his grandmother that the new appliance came from money won on the court. It’s classic Cam—flooded with rich detail and three-dimensional characters. When he recalls growing up alongside the late Big L and “the dude supposedly killed him” on “This Is My City,” his famously strict rules on snitching force him to concede, “When the time’s right I will tell you about these villains.” It’s a reminder that, even after all these years, there’s still so much of the Cam’ron story we don’t know.
Yet if the original Purple Haze is the creative spirit powering this record, it’s also the standard to which it will inevitably be compared. The gulf between the two is apparent: Instead of “The Dope Man,” Cam’s brilliant East Coast re-imagination of NWA’s ode to a drug dealer, we get him unimaginatively rapping over the familiar sounds of Mary Jane Girls’ “All Night Long” on “Keep Rising.” There’s no potential single here to match “Down and Out,” the best 2004 Kanye West beat that Ye didn’t put on The College Dropout. Guest spots from Dipset are missed, with only Jim Jones making a late appearance on closer “Straight Harlem,” and strangely for one of the funniest skit-makers of all time, there are zero skits. But never mind these gripes. While it’s no match for the original, Purple Haze 2 still gifts us Cam’ron at his most natural and approachable, rapping for the joy of the form. | 2020-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Killa Entertainment | January 16, 2020 | 7 | 554fc357-bcc7-4251-8c2e-4a840ca1de2a | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The sole LP from short-lived Hamburg garage band the Monks now ranks in the upper echelon of 1960s gems. This new set pulls together 15 minutes’ worth of odds and ends recorded during their final year. | The sole LP from short-lived Hamburg garage band the Monks now ranks in the upper echelon of 1960s gems. This new set pulls together 15 minutes’ worth of odds and ends recorded during their final year. | The Monks: Hamburg Recordings 1967 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-monks-hamburg-recordings-1967/ | Hamburg Recordings 1967 | The Monks’ tenure as Hamburg’s premier tonsure-coiffed proto-punks lasted barely two years—they released their Black Monk Time LP in 1966 and, following a few more singles, disbanded by 1967. While playing clubs in the same seedy Reeperbahn district that the Beatles had lit up only a few years earlier, the American G.I. soldiers in the Monks followed their own path. Filled with manic, rhythm-focused arrangements that employed Dave Day’s banjo as an auxiliary percussive layer, Black Monk Time ranks in the upper echelon of obscure ’60s gems with its own voice, not trying to imitate contemporary chart-toppers. Like Silver Apples’ self-titled 1968 debut and few others, it still sounds new in the 21st century.
Following a 2009 collection of early demos, Hamburg Recordings 1967 pulls together what is posited as the last unreleased Monks material, 15 minutes worth of odds and ends recorded during the band’s final year. But, fun as it is, it’s mostly ends. While Monks fans will surely be glad to have any more examples of the band at work, only one of the songs feels as developed as anything on Black Monk Time or their subsequent singles. Recorded during February 1967 sessions for the band’s final 7” “Love Can Tame the Wild,” the disc-opening “I’m Watching You” taps into the quintet’s tightly-wound art-rock menace with an apparent effortlessness, guitar and organ riffs spiraling into a nearly cymbal-less slash. It was a sound the band spent much of the previous years refining, a rhythmic muse that had drummer Roger Johnston removing extraneous percussion, much like his contemporary Moe Tucker across the Atlantic in the Velvet Underground.
Though each song is charming and Monk-like in its own ways, pointing in a few otherwise undocumented directions, the remaining four tracks of Hamburg Recordings 1967 serve to highlight what was so remarkable about the Monks’ earlier work. Recorded onstage after-hours at the Top Ten Club—where the Beatles lived in the attic six years previous—the remaining songs reveal a still-developing band, seemingly moving away from the darker vibes for which they would be remembered. Just as the nearly harsh grooves and blunt lyrics of Black Monk Time sometimes parallel the Velvet Underground, the vaudevillian lilt of “Julia” seems to predict the music hall tendencies of Sgt. Pepper, or merely echoes the electrified jug bandisms of the Lovin’ Spoonful.
Like the Beatles before them, the Monks churned out music for six hours a night (eight or more on weekends), covering the hits of the day, including Chuck Berry, British Invasion singles, and surf tunes. But the originals sounded little like that, and—in the band’s accounts—they kept hammering away until they sounded even more original. With a number of previously unseen candid photos reproduced in the packaging, the Monks (or just “Monks” as their business cards and stylized organ cabinet read) look as if they are from a time of their own. They stare down future listeners with a severe post-Beatnik/pre-psychedelic vibe from an alternate time-track, each band member sporting the literal and ominous opposite of a moptop, shaving the domes of their heads.
But little of the unheard Monks on Hamburg Recordings 1967 communicates quite the same worked-over attention to detail emitted by Blank Monk Time, nor the blunt anti-war sentiments. On “P.O. Box 3291,” they sound more like a standard-issue garage band. Across the disc’s final two tracks, an uncredited trumpet player doubles Larry Clark’s organ in places to create an imitation horn section, pointing the way towards yet another future the Monks didn’t have.
With a trumpet part that recalls Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Turn on Your Love Light,” the disc-closing instrumental “Yellow Grass” maybe sounds more like their Hamburg contemporaries, and less like the weirdos that record collectors would revere decades later. But with no vintage live Monks reels yet discovered in a German attic, Hamburg Recordings 1967 is the last sound of a band still being born. | 2017-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Third Man | June 27, 2017 | 6.9 | 55526f26-f635-4c9e-87bb-c71d96fc8f63 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit an art-rock masterpiece, a thrilling synthesis of artifice and Afrobeat. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit an art-rock masterpiece, a thrilling synthesis of artifice and Afrobeat. | Talking Heads: Remain in Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/talking-heads-remain-in-light/ | Remain in Light | The German playwright Bertolt Brecht is credited with the aphorism “a theater without beer is just a museum.” No one can point to where he actually said it, but let us indulge a system of attribution where publication and page are less important than what we feel like Brecht would say. The idea is appealing: that art without a visceral element—without something that hits your gut and intoxicates you—is dead. As much as we like to think about art, art is not for our brains. At nearly every turn, Remain in Light thwarts cognitive sense to appeal to the gut. Or maybe the limbic system? I’m not a doctor—whatever part of human physiology is responsible for getting funky.
By 1980, the conflict in music between what was thought and what was felt was in full cry. As disco continued to monopolize music you could dance to, rock reached a point of maximum theoretical sincerity. Pink Floyd’s The Wall, possibly the least ironic recording of all time, was the No. 1 album in America for 15 weeks. It was finally unseated by Bob Seger’s Against the Wind, which was knocked out of the top spot by Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. Ostensibly, these were works of deep sentiment. To a generation of punks, though, they were rock at its most bloodless and calculating.
Although they were a new wave band, Talking Heads operated within New York’s larger punk scene, which was predicated on rejecting the artifice of late-’70s rock. Punk sought a music that was felt and not just performed. And yet, Talking Heads were conspicuously artificial. David Byrne made his approach to both songwriting and performance as unnatural as possible. He wrote Dada lyrics about parking lots and fire. His vocals were marred by cracks and unnatural modulations that thwarted melody. Onstage, his movements gave the impression of nervousness but, like, a performed nervousness: When he danced, he seemed to be making fun of dancing.
In short, he acted fake. But his fakery was so consistent, its logic so continuously evident, that it became a convincing public identity. In performance and on record, there was no part of Byrne that was not himself. As a result, his artifice seemed more honest than Seger’s verge-of-tears yarling or Pink Floyd’s proggy self-pity. The central insight of Talking Heads—what made them not just weird but exciting and relevant—was that their art-house affectation felt more sincere than a lot of American culture.
The band’s progression can be understood as a continual overlaying of artifices. While other punk acts pursued authenticity by stripping down, Talking Heads built up. They first performed as Talking Heads in 1975, opening for the Ramones at CBGB as a trio, with Byrne on vocals and guitar, Tina Weymouth on bass, and Chris Frantz on drums. Shortly before releasing their first studio album, Talking Heads: 77, they added keyboardist and guitarist Jerry Harrison. They began collaborating with producer Brian Eno for More Songs About Buildings and Food in 1978, followed by Fear of Music in 1979. Eno kept pushing the band toward new sounds and instruments until the Remain in Light tour was traveling with 10 musicians in the band.
This mass created the impression that Talking Heads was a collective—one that might embark on a familiar song only to arrive somewhere wild and strange. “There is something essential about losing control over what you do,” Weymouth told the Canadian zine Pig Paper in 1977. This would also turn out to be a central insight, as the band increasingly coupled its conceptual experiments with rhythm arrangements designed to make its core members—and its audience—lose control.
Talking Heads’ belief that artifice could feel more real than fake sincerity paved the way for future art rock acts, but Remain in Light differs from successors like Laurie Anderson or Life Without Buildings in that you can dance to it. The rhythm arrangements on this album are irresistible. They are the visceral complement to Byrne’s conceptual lyrics about air conditioning and his face. This combination of gutsy rhythms and heady words elevates songs like “Crosseyed and Painless” from nonsense to dream logic. What begins as an idea becomes, in its fullest expression, a feeling.
The synthesis succeeds due to Byrne and Eno’s incorporation of a third, unfamiliar element: Afrobeat, a style of music that became popular in Ghana and Nigeria during the 1970s. The pioneering artist of Afrobeat was Fela Kuti, whose 1973 album Afrodisiac Eno played for Byrne the night they met in 1977. According to Eno, Afrodisiac would become the template for Remain in Light.
Afrobeat combined American funk and jazz influences with West-African polyrhythms, a term drummers use to stop people from talking to them at parties. Essentially, a polyrhythm superimposes beats in different time signatures over one another. You can hear this technique in isolation during the opening bars of Kuti’s “Why Black Man Dey Suffer,” which puts three sets of triplets over cut time before building to a complete rhythm. Whole dissertations are written about this branch of music theory. Even the simple explanations are impenetrable to people without percussion backgrounds, but the head will bob independently of the twitching feet, and there you have in dancing what the brain refuses to grasp.
Talking Heads experimented with polyrhythms on 1979’s Fear of Music with “I, Zimbra,” speeding them up and maintaining an overarching 4/4 beat. The opening track of Remain in Light, “Born Under Punches,” preserves the frenetic speed but dispenses with beat in favor of rhythm. It bursts into a multilayered guitar, bass, and drum pattern that resists counting but demands dancing, yanking the listener into a cloud of short, sharp noises with only involuntary movements to guide us through.
Over this background, Byrne bellows: “Take a look at these hands/The hand speaks/The hand of a government man.” Later he adds, “I’m so thin.” These words do not make sense. They mimic the condition of the listener amid the swirl of polyrhythms, though, caught in a moment of reflection that yields no insight but only feelings. It is the sound of stage-two cocaine addiction, when you are always doing something but never know what to do. The hand speaks: We lose control of ourselves, and what we have done becomes our new identity. The elliptical lyrics at the beginning of Remain in Light can be read as an artist’s statement: Taking their music in an unpredictable new direction, Talking Heads have found their essence by losing control over what they do.
And then there’s “Once in a Lifetime,” which remains enjoyable precisely because it resists interpretation. Its “You may find yourself/You may ask yourself” motif makes it clear that it is about experiencing a moment of alienation from your own life and taking stock—but to conclude what? The chorus is about where water is located. Byrne sings it in a call-and-response style with the rest of the band (also a signature feature of Afrobeat) and the ecstatic, congregational atmosphere makes it feel like an answer to the existential questions of the verses. But you cannot say what any of it means. This ineffable quality is what makes “Once in a Lifetime” feel like a moving song about the scope of your whole life no matter how many times you hear it.
Although Remain in Light has become an acknowledged classic, it retains a feeling of unfamiliarity. It is tempting to attribute this quality to Byrne’s obtuse lyrics, but the album’s instrumental arrangements also constitute a break with rock’s conventional forms. Weymouth’s bassline on “Crosseyed and Painless” crowds staccato bursts of notes into the first half of each measure, leaving the second half empty in a way that defines the percussion pattern. This technique, essential to funk, diverges from rock’s standard practice of using the bass to keep time. Perhaps the album’s greatest heresy, though, is its total absence of guitar riffs. Like Weymouth, Harrison prefers to use his instrument as a noisemaker. His howling fills on “Listening Wind” lend a foreboding, unpredictable atmosphere to lyrics that are as close as Byrne gets to conventional narrative. These tracks do not hew as strictly to Afrobeat forms as “Once in a Lifetime” or “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On),” but they still manage to introduce a coherent sound that is alien to mainstream rock.
Without Afrobeat, though, there is no Remain in Light. The central role of West-African polyrhythms in the album’s sound draws attention to a curious aspect of its longevity. Could a group of white musicians playing Afrobeat be taken sincerely in 2018? Virtually every genre of American music, including punk and especially rock, is taken from black forms. Afrobeat is not African-American, though; it’s straight-up African. The 21st-century sensibility finds something problematic in a band of white art-school types playing West African music. Earlier this year, the Beninese musician Angelique Kidjo released her own version of Remain in Light, which NPR described as “an authentic Afrobeat record” compared to the original. Given how closely Kidjo followed the Talking Heads’ arrangements, this description raises questions about what we mean when we say “authentic.”
The success of Remain in Light—undeniable regardless of our ideas about the degree to which artists should respect historically ethnic divisions between musical forms—forces us to reckon with the album’s contradictions. Rock is a more welcoming genre today than it was in 1980, and punk has never seemed closer to the perennial danger that it will become a parody of itself. Still, it is hard to imagine a current underground rock band like Joyce Manor taking a turn toward the music of the Nigerian Afropop star Davido without getting laughed into oblivion. The fact that Talking Heads pulled it off so spectacularly, even 38 years ago, is a tribute to their aptitude as students of music.
There is something motivational about Remain in Light, not just as dance music but as expression. On “Seen and Not Seen,” Byrne speculates that a man might change his appearance “by keeping an ideal facial structure fixed in the back of his mind.” It’s an absurd commentary on the nature of vanity, but it also declares a touching faith in artistic willpower—a faith Remain in Light rewards. The album presents such a strange artistic vision, foreign to what came before but operating as though it were the culmination of a long tradition, that it seems to declare the power of weirdness itself. To be not just strange but singular, to reinvent a form in a way that you can dance to, to smuggle beer into the museum: This is the visceral thrill of art. We want to deny it on theoretical grounds, but we can’t. So we must revise our theories. | 2018-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sire | October 21, 2018 | 10 | 5554a110-23a5-4762-9e22-5e453b3f3cbb | Dan Brooks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dan-brooks/ | |
Seven years after his breakout hit, the UK house producer’s debut album aims to bridge generation-defining dance sounds with more emotive electronic fare, but mostly struggles to find its way. | Seven years after his breakout hit, the UK house producer’s debut album aims to bridge generation-defining dance sounds with more emotive electronic fare, but mostly struggles to find its way. | Duke Dumont: Duality | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/duke-dumont-duality/ | Duality | Duke Dumont rode the mid-2010s wave of radio-friendly deep house into superstardom. Alongside contemporaries like Disclosure, he blended classic house tropes with the punchy clarity of modern EDM pop. In two years, Dumont topped the singles chart in his native United Kingdom twice and hit No. 1 on the U.S. Dance Club chart five times. Now, seven years after his breakout single, “Need U (100%),” Dumont’s debut LP only highlights how far dance music has moved on from the era when his soulful vocal chops and frictionless beats felt like a breath of fresh air.
Duality takes its title from what Dumont claims are the two sides of his artistic self: consummate hitmaker and bold experimentalist. (“NO GENRE, NO BOUNDARIES, NO RESTRAINTS AND NO FEAR,” he asserted when he announced the album.) This split plays out, unsubtly, in the sequencing of the LP, with its dancier A-side and more introspective, freewheeling B-side. But it’s nearly impossible, on either front, to get a sense of anything that informs Dumont’s vision beyond unobjectionable studio chops and a residual penchant for clichéd EDM builds. The productions’ defining quality is that they are sufficiently devoid of idiosyncrasies to serve as adequate vehicles for guest vocalists.
This approach didn’t always result in mediocrity. Dumont’s 2012 single “The Giver” spun a passing phrase from the late Chicago diva Kim English into an addictive groove, while “Need U (100%)” was a thunderous piece of UKG-inflected house, even without A*M*E’s entrancing vocals. But the songs on Duality rarely approach the vitality of those tracks. Lead single “Therapy,” with a forceful performance from Yola, ought to be a knockout, but a clumsy jumble of breaks and piano house keeps it from greatness. Other features are more criminally misused; on “Obey,” rudimentary techno stabs and stale acid breakdowns neuter an anti-establishment oration from legendary house vocalist Roland Clark. (It’s a shame, because Clark’s spoken-word efforts, as another one of his recent collaborations reveals, can be effective when they’re paired with less cluttered productions.)
On the second half of the album, How to Dress Well is recognizable on the vocoder-heavy endeavor “Together,” if only in timbre. This superficial ode to unity largely falls flat, but that’s not all Tom Krell’s fault. At the emotional apex, when the track swells into syncopated blasts of synth and crash cymbal, Dumont makes a brazen attempt at triggering the intoxicating main-stage euphoria of one-time rave wunderkinds like Porter Robinson or Madeon. Then the overblown arena-rock drum fill kicks in, and the whole thing ends up sounding like a facsimile of other, more emotionally affecting songs—a cheap play to the rafters. It’s a staggering disappointment, especially from a producer who once touted his hitmaking foresight when it came to the electronic music zeitgeist. “This will sound arrogant, but before ‘Need U (100%),’ there were no house records that got to No.1 in the charts,” Dumont said back in 2016, proudly proclaiming that his single “Ocean Drive” would “spawn copycat records, which will inevitably be commercially more successful”—apparently having his sour-grapes cake and eating it too.
Fitting, then, that a reprised version of that last song sits in the middle of his debut album’s tracklist, half a decade removed from its original release. The lush synth pop of “Ocean Drive” has retained much of its charm, and it’s the still best moment on the record, far more memorable than its closest counterpart (the Say Lou Lou collaboration “Nightcrawler”) or album closer “Let Me Go,” featuring Ry X, which begins as a Sam Smithian ballad before inflating itself with middling trance arpeggios. Duality wants to be the moment that Duke Dumont re-introduces himself as a producer who’s capable of both generation-defining dance records and more emotive electronic work. Instead, you’re left with the sense that in a post-EDM world, he doesn’t know where to go next. | 2020-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | April 22, 2020 | 5.2 | 55587e6d-ceed-4fce-8acb-e6793acefae7 | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
Experimental label mappa editions’ elegiac collection of avian electronics is full of deliberately laid textures and out-there approaches to composition. | Experimental label mappa editions’ elegiac collection of avian electronics is full of deliberately laid textures and out-there approaches to composition. | Various Artists: Synthetic Bird Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-synthetic-bird-music/ | Various Artists: Synthetic Bird Music | The trees are disappearing, and so are their inhabitants. In the past 20 years, global forest coverage has dropped by roughly 10 percent, and one-third of bird species are expected to go extinct by the end of this century. Jakub Juhás, head of Slovakian label mappa editions, is surely aware of this. Over the years, the label has built a hall of mirrors from environmental recordings and experimental compositions; a look into its catalog reveals haunted cave dives, explorations of rust, and snowed-in a capella. It is a body of work interested in solitude, intimacy, and hushed electronics. Mappa’s latest release, Synthetic Bird Music, compiles 32 electronic and experimental music pieces inextricably bound up with nature. The works range from years old to brand new, but they are joined by a shared interest in organic and electronic synthesis. It is the sound of musicians the world over reckoning with an ongoing climate catastrophe.
As early as the 17th century, professional whistlers—siffleurs—worked the vaudeville circuit and ventured into the woods, mocking mockingbirds and playing alongside nightingales. Synthetic Bird Music picks up this torch with a newfound urgency, conjuring birdsong that doesn’t exist and engineering accompaniment for birds that do. It is dominated by slow pieces and brain-bending synth work, with elegiac keyboards echoing the thinning populations they’re meant to emulate. On “La guardian de las ondas radiales 1” (“The Guardian of the Radio Waves”), Makakinho del Amor (aka Tomás Tello) wraps bird calls in a blanket of static and high-pitched keyboards. Hmot’s “Irekle Qoştar” takes a few bits of birdsong and cranks up the distortion until they sound like a transmission from a dying ham radio. Much of the compilation works like this: It is a swan dive into the uncanny valley, sitting somewhere between real and imagined, playful and unsettling.
Synthetic Bird Music outlines a world of approaches to birdsong and its accompaniment: Found-sound industrial techno (Native Instrument’s “Vögel Unserer Heimat”), wigged-out Fourth-World ambience (Tomutonttu’s “Harpusta / Tarjous”), avian post-rock (Baldruin’s “Sonderbare Ereignisse am Lake Hillier”), and haunted-house synth workouts (Mike Cooper’s “The Wild Birds of Bluesealand”). The record brings together artists from umpteen scenes—Bratislava and Berkshire, San Francisco and Sydney—but each work feels like part of an unspoken narrative, an atlas stuffed with imagined landscapes. (It helps that the record is arranged chronologically, moving from pre-dawn birdsong to late-night ambience.) Synthetic Bird Music functions as a survey of contemporary electronic-music experimentation, looking across the globe for deliberately laid textures and out-there approaches to composition.
On a record filled with scraggly noise and electroacoustic trickery, Øyvind Torvund’s standout “Wind Up Paradise Birds” comes as a bit of a shock. The composition, pulled from 2019’s The Exotica Album, imagines flutes, saxophones, and a chamber orchestra in the center of an aviary. In context, it’s disorienting: a baroque celebration of nature situated early in a record concerned with its erosion. Even there, though, its instrumentation looks at the natural world through a technological lens—its birds sound suspiciously similar to short-wave radio. Again and again, the artists featured on Synthetic Bird Music turn their ears towards thinning skies and the shudder of falling trees, constructing a memorial for an ecosystem that is quietly disappearing in a celebration of modern avant-garde electronics. | 2023-11-27T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-27T00:01:00.000-05:00 | null | Mappa Editions | November 27, 2023 | 7.3 | 55631ee4-49be-4211-bcb6-a79dd13ee72c | Michael McKinney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-mckinney/ | |
Nick Drake's original producer Joe Boyd organized a series of tribute concerts around the world to celebrate the British folk legend. Way to Blue is a companion compilation featuring Robyn Hitchcock, Vashti Bunyan, Scritti Politti's Green Gartside, Lisa Hannigan, and others. | Nick Drake's original producer Joe Boyd organized a series of tribute concerts around the world to celebrate the British folk legend. Way to Blue is a companion compilation featuring Robyn Hitchcock, Vashti Bunyan, Scritti Politti's Green Gartside, Lisa Hannigan, and others. | Various Artists: Way to Blue: The Songs of Nick Drake | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17799-way-to-blue-the-songs-of-nick-drake/ | Way to Blue: The Songs of Nick Drake | In 2010 and 2011, producer Joe Boyd spearheaded a series of live shows in tribute to Nick Drake, hand-picking performers to cover Drake’s songs. Boyd was not only a central figure in the 1960s folk revival on both sides of the Atlantic, but he produced Drake’s first two albums, Five Leaves Left in 1969 and Bryter Layter in 1970. Few knew Drake quite so well as Boyd, so few are so qualified to re-stage these songs in an affectionate tribute. The mood on Way to Blue: The Songs of Nick Drake, which collects highlights from the concerts, is reverent and dignified, occasionally rethinking arrangements but mostly adhering to the familiar orchestral swells, piano runs, and jazzy guitar licks.
Perhaps that’s the problem. Especially in 2013, 14 years after the VW ad that turned every car buyer into a Pink Moon fan, Way to Blue is too rigid in its approach and too timid in its interpretations to challenge or enlarge our perception of Drake. The tracklist includes several generations of artists, from Vashti Bunyan to Luluc, but with precious few exceptions, they turn Drake’s songs into mumbly folk-pop-- aggressively decorous and strangely passive. In fact, aside from the atrocious backing vocals on Shane Nicholson’s version of “Poor Boy”, the performances are perfectly adequate, but who wants adequate when you can easily pull up the originals, which still sound lovely and intense and devastating.
Despite Green Gartside’s noble yet safe reading of “Fruit Tree”, the only artist who truly gets under the skin of Drake’s music is his contemporary Vashti Bunyan. She manages to overcome the spectacle of the historical venue and deliver a truly meaningful and disarming reinterpretation of “Which Will”, savoring certain syllables and twisting the words into new and strange shapes. By comparison, Lisa Hannigan’s cover of “Black Eyed Dog” sounds self-consciously eccentric, her warbles and coos too practiced, but that’s preferable to Teddy Thompson’s colorless take on “River Man”.
Is it their fault for sounding so passive in their performances, or is it Boyd’s fault for restricting the possibilities and keeping the project so beholden to Drake’s legacy? Most likely the blame rests with everyone, but in truth the very concept of Way to Blue seems flawed: The setting is far too public for Drake’s private ruminations, which reinforces the idea that he lived his pain for public consumption. Boyd and his cohorts aren’t inviting you to sympathize with that pain, but to experience it voyeuristically. Or, to borrow some insight from Boyd’s book White Bicycles, in which he discusses a recent concert by Aretha Franklin: “Waves of self-congratulatory affection passed back and forth between [Franklin and the audience]: she claiming credit for recognizing what they wanted to hear; the audience adoring themselves for being so hip as to want the ‘real thing.’ The music was caught in the middle, lifeless and predictable.”
(Editor's note: This album was reviewed from an advance copy that contained applause between the songs. The applause was later removed from the final release. The original review had references to the applause that have been deleted.) | 2013-04-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-04-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | StorySound | April 12, 2013 | 4.7 | 55648520-9577-4480-9df7-d792c88ec139 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On her fourth album, Mitski makes a resounding personal statement and stakes out her territory as one of the most compelling voices in the sphere of indie rock. | On her fourth album, Mitski makes a resounding personal statement and stakes out her territory as one of the most compelling voices in the sphere of indie rock. | Mitski: Puberty 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21970-puberty-2/ | Puberty 2 | Depression and fits of anxiety have inspired plenty of great music, but there is something else taking shape in Mitski Miyawaki’s tense fourth album, Puberty 2: a detailed chronicling of the day-to-day interior struggle to be happy. The 25-year-old Brooklyn singer-songwriter is engaged in a larger struggle to pin down what, exactly, happiness is—at least for now, at that point in life when true adulthood starts to meet reality. Sometimes Mitski looks for contentedness in simple routine, like jogging or wearing a clean, white button-down. These small acts of control help stave off the larger dread, like not knowing how to pay rent or crawling out of her skin with wanderlust, feelings she addresses with incandescent punk rage on “My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars.”
Other times, Mitski wonders if lovers might ease some of this anxiety, mostly finding that they just add to it. She begins Puberty 2 with a clever song-length metaphor about the fleeting nature of happiness, likening it to the boy who comes over with cookies, comes in her, and leaves while she’s in the bathroom. On “A Loving Feeling,” she laments a lust that leaves her feeling lonely, via men who “only love [her] when they're all alone.” Songs like this and “Once More to See You” are as much homages to ’60s girl-group romance as they are send-ups of the submission and loneliness underlying many of the original hits. But placed in the present, these songs seem to tap into the frustration of love at a time when there are myriad ways to be with someone, many of them willfully undefined.
Puberty 2 is grounded in Mitski’s distorted guitar, and at times feels like it’s in direct conversation with the very notion of the indie rock canon. This makes the album sound simultaneously familiar and challenging, never more so than on lead single “Your Best American Girl,” where she taps directly into what made people love early Weezer and other ’90s bands favoring a catchy/fuzzy dichotomy. What a satisfying twist, this half-Japanese transplant taking the specific sounds that once served to lust over her very existence and using them to not only reclaim her identity, but also to ache after heartbreak. At first the chorus goes, “Your mother wouldn't approve of how my mother raised me/But I do, I think I do,” but by the song’s conclusion, Mitski has grown more certain, shifting crucially to, “But I do, I finally do.”
Though its appeal is immediate, a song like “Your Best American Girl” is not knocked off quickly—there are layers and layers of sound here, generated by just Mitski and her producer Patrick Hyland. She has a knack for mixing dynamics and errant noises like some people mix patterns in their wardrobe: It shouldn’t make sense, but it does. Consider the album’s climax, “Crack Baby,” where a chintzy-on-purpose beat meets eerily precise vocal phrasing recalling Annie Clark, falsetto “ooohs,” smoldering waves of spaghetti western guitar, and a full minute of wind rustling on a cliffside. As Mitski likens her yearning for now-distant memories of happiness to the pull of inadvertent addiction, she sets the scene with a curious lyrical juxtaposition between man-made bleakness and natural beauty: “Down empty streets sniffing glue, me and you/Blank open eyes watch the moon flower bloom.”
This is the experience of listening to Mitski: When you look closely, everything is a little trickier than it had once seemed. Puberty 2 plumbs second-wave emo in the storytelling, wistful dream-pop to blunt the pain, slow-simmering electronics, brusquely strummed folk-punk, bits of surf guitar, and plenty of ’60s pop hooks; none of them show up just once, though, so they all end up feeling incorporated into the album’s overall sound. Her editing eye is impeccable, which it needs to be when mixing this many patterns.
There is, of course, a very simple rule for pattern-mixing: there must be unity in the color palette. Mitski’s very Mitski-ness is what holds Puberty 2 together. This quality is not relegated simply to her wry and articulate lyrics, staggering and sharp as many of them are. I can’t imagine mistaking a Mitski song for another’s, and it’s in large part because of her voice, which stretches through different modes—deadpan disenfranchisement, smooth R&B, dream-pop croon, gasping-for-breath pleas, wall of harmonies (with herself). Yet she fully harnesses every voice on the album, guiding us through emotional terrain only she knows by heart.
Mitski honed this versatility on three previous LPs of distinct material, from the unsettling and arch piano fare of her 2012 debut Lush to 2014’s scrappy Bury Me at Makeout Creek, her breakthrough and first “rock” album. On Puberty 2, every note she’s played comes together. It’s a resounding personal statement and the clearest sign that while she might be an “indie rock” artist, she currently stands apart from—and above—much of the genre. She tackles bigger themes, gambles with higher musical stakes, and digs deeper into herself.
Ultimately, Puberty 2 is for anyone who knows the power struggle between what we feel and what we want to feel. Mitski plays it like she’s losing this game for much of the album, but she knows better than to leave us so low. By the stunning dénouement “A Burning Hill,” she calls a truce with herself: “I’m tired of wanting more, I think I’m finally worn.” “I’ll love some littler things,” she sighs, knowing that for someone so complicated, it’s probably impossible. | 2016-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | June 22, 2016 | 8.5 | 556674a3-dd5a-4c7a-9b2e-cddb5c8c3c44 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
null | Conor Oberst sends shivers down my spine, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. The straight-from-the-diary lyrics, the sudden screams and that hiccuping vibrato-- the qualities that make him seem raw and, to some, risible-- are also striking and awesome. Oberst is a strange hybrid: He's undeniably a pop star, and also undeniably an indie rocker. On the pop side, he has what music journalist Simon Reynolds identified as the power to compel your gaze, and when he gets it, those wet, penetrating eyes stare straight back. I know it makes me uncomfortable; why can't he just look at his | Bright Eyes: I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning / Digital Ash in a Digital Urn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11683-im-wide-awake-its-morning-digital-ash-in-a-digital-urn/ | I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning / Digital Ash in a Digital Urn | Conor Oberst sends shivers down my spine, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. The straight-from-the-diary lyrics, the sudden screams and that hiccuping vibrato-- the qualities that make him seem raw and, to some, risible-- are also striking and awesome. Oberst is a strange hybrid: He's undeniably a pop star, and also undeniably an indie rocker. On the pop side, he has what music journalist Simon Reynolds identified as the power to compel your gaze, and when he gets it, those wet, penetrating eyes stare straight back. I know it makes me uncomfortable; why can't he just look at his feet and fumble with his guitar and murmur his songs from a distance?
At the same time, where most of our pop stars spring fully formed from the heads of their handlers, Oberst remains a DI(mostly)Y, friends-over-money, fuck-the-man independent musician. He makes mistakes, indulges his excesses (oh, Lifted, how close you were to a home run), and even shouts his politics, inarticulately but without restraint, which is something that fewer and fewer musicians at his tier would have the guts to do their first time on Craig Kilborn.
As you've probably heard from the media blitz, tomorrow Oberst is releasing both a record of road-tested acoustic material and a new project of electronica-flavored pop. The specific triumph of his two new albums lies in how they deliver a new, more seasoned Oberst, retaining what's great in his talent while purging the rough edges.
Let's start with the album that's merely "decent." Oberst and producer Mike Mogis had talked about making a more rhythmic and electronic album since even before Lifted, and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn finally realizes that project, setting Oberst in front of a rock band, beats and strings. But where a Björk would have tackled this by flitting around the world to find the hottest club DJs and the coldest Inuit choirs, Oberst put the record together with a small crew of his buddies: While Jimmy Tamborello of the Postal Service co-produced the first single, "Take It Easy (Love Nothing)" and the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Nick Zinner swings by for a few cameos, the producer that Oberst relies on most heavily is Mogis, who programs under the alias the Digital Audio Engine.
Digital Ash places Oberst's voice front and center, stripping away his guitar and impromptu vocalizations and tying him to each song like a good pop star; witness the way he takes "Devil in the Details" with the stance of a Bowie. And where the lyrics are self-centered, Oberst still projects himself more broadly and concisely than on Lifted, as he ruminates from up high on everything from the circle of life and death to admitting that he's a dick when he drinks.
But if Oberst picked up better posture, he's still learning where to take it. It's hard to pinpoint why Digital Ash is merely "okay." The songs are enjoyable, and if Tamborello chips in the most exciting beats, Mogis' are competitive, especially the bamboo-footed-tap-dancer rhythms of "Arc of Time (Time Code)" or the moody "nightmare" sequence that launches the record. But nothing else captures such a gripping mood. Digital Ash has the claustrophobic feel of a singer locked up with a computer, and it's distractingly chipper, like Rilo Kiley in their own Dntel homages; not every Bright Eyes record has to be an emotional epic, but Digital Ash feels like a practice run. Consider it version 1.0.
If Digital Ash sounds like indie kids breaking into pop, its sister disc, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, is a red-blooded folk album that's coincidentally built to be hugely, hugely popular. Oberst has been so close to Americana that I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning won't surprise anyone, and even Emmylou Harris' glorious cameos aren't a stamp of approval so much as a professional decision to bring in someone who can nail these harmonies-- a rare and totally warranted exception to the "friends-only" policy, because a twentysomething couldn't make pretty sound as weary as Harris on "Land Locked Blues".
I'm Wide Awake perfectly captures a place and time in Oberst's life. It chronicles his first memories of staying in New York City, and the metropolis rarely gets a folk singer to chronicle its streets this lucidly, at least since the hootenanny days; he frequents its parties and stumbles down its streets like a midwestern transplant instead of a jaded hipster, sings about chemical dependency and the endless pains of love, while capturing as a backdrop the build-up to a foreign war. I'm Wide Awake weaves the personal and the political more fluidly than most singers even care to try, and the consummate tunefulness just strengthens those moments where he pinches a nerve-- the songs that still give me chills every time, like "At the Bottom of Everything": "Into the face of every criminal strapped firmly to a chair/ We must stare, we must stare, we must stare."
This record was made to be loved, to be obsessed over by some but remembered by everybody, to get scratched and worn out through constant rotation in a sorority living room or your first studio apartment or your mom's old radio, to capture Conor Oberst for the first time with more polish than spit, but still getting him deeply under your skin. And he earns it so thoroughly that while "Poison Oak" would have been a fine, graceful closer, he propels us instead to the big Bright Eyes finale of "Road to Joy", where he justifies the joke of cadging Beethoven's most famous theme, drives the cascading horns and searing guitars, and finally, finally screams his head off. Give yourself to it and you'll understand that when Oberst's staring so piercingly from all those magazine covers, this is what he's looking at. | 2005-01-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-01-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | null | January 23, 2005 | 8.7 | 556b24d3-e620-41ac-91c3-32509dddf986 | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
A new comp of charming, peculiar, and strangely timeless Australian DIY music released mostly on cassette-zines in the ‘80s amid the macho pub rock sound of the decade. | A new comp of charming, peculiar, and strangely timeless Australian DIY music released mostly on cassette-zines in the ‘80s amid the macho pub rock sound of the decade. | Various Artists: Oz Waves: Compiled by Steele Bonus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22762-oz-waves-compiled-by-steele-bonus/ | Oz Waves: Compiled by Steele Bonus | During the ’80s, the Australian pop culture exports seemed to be comprised of Mad Max, Paul “Crocodile Dundee” Hogan, INXS, Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett, Yahoo Serious and of course, Jacko. It’s a motley group that speaks to the spiky strangeness inherent in the continent’s figures. But leave it to Michael Kucyk (host of Noise in My Head on NTS Radio) to unearth the sounds being made in Australia far off the radar. His Efficient Space label has already pulled out some blissful Australian house, weirdo new wave and last year’s stark but haunting Sky Girl compilation.
The ten tracks on Oz Waves might be their most peculiar set yet. Culled by a DJ who goes by the handle of Steele Bonus (he also has a series of thrilling Soundcloud mixes), he’s unearthed rare examples of Australian DIY rendered in the ’80s amid the macho pub rock sound of the decade. With most Aussie major labels wholly uninterested in such strange drum machine-laced sounds (though INXS did have a penchant for dub weirdness), most artists and short-lived bands opted instead to make artful cassette-zines instead. As the Oz Waves notes attest, many were dubbed in editions ranging from 5 to 100 copies.
Not that any of the acts had dreams of pop stardom when they plugged in their guitars, Groovebox drum machines, and primitive synths to make their lo-fi din. Bands bearing names like Ironing Music, He Dark Age and the Horse He's Sick don’t really have Top of the Pops in mind. These bands revel in freedom, knowing that with no major labels, no crowds to perform in front of and, for the most part, no drummer, they were free to document the strangest noises that sprung from their heads. It’s ostensibly punk rock, but 30 years on, time has a way of changing such meanings. The primitive beats and befuddling noises that bounce off the walls of each song make it come across as endearingly insular dance music.
Much like New Yorkers in the early ’80s who identified more as art collectives than bands, the acts here also dabbled in video art, painting, and visual design. Irena Xero was on the Brisbane punk scene in the late ’70s but also into cross-discipline arts. She sounds like a one-woman automaton on “Lady on the Train,” programming chilly handclaps and delivering lines with even less affect than Nico. Andy Rantzen’s “Will I Dream?” went unreleased in 1989, but it makes sense considering he soon moved from doing industrial-styled noise to making rave tracks. Deeming it the most dancefloor-friendly track in the set seems like a misnomer, as it’s a strange puddle of funky bass and peppy snare, flickering sinewaves, submarine alarms and mewling voices.
While Prod’s “Knife on Top” features a limber Can-like groove to it and Zerox Dreamflesh do woozy Augustus Pablo-esque dub on “Squids Can Fly,” most bands here prefer sputtering drum machines, which make for the set’s most charming moments. They provide the stitching underneath the flanged accordion and Urszula Dawkins’ plainspoken delivery on Software Seduction’s “New Collision” and the lo-fi sampledelica of “Jesus Krist Klap Rap (Orthodox Mix).” The Groovebox that Ironing Music utilized makes them sound like the Down Under version of Young Marble Giants on the sparkling bedroom murmur that is “Don’t Wish It Away.” A heavier beat gets sampled by the Horse He’s Sick, but rather than try to move a dance audience, it instead gets strung out to a crawl. It's these micro-moments, operating in the shadow of their more popular contemporaries of the era, that allow Oz Waves’ dusty charms to shine through four decades later. | 2017-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Efficient Space | February 24, 2017 | 7.6 | 556ca056-4b8a-418f-90fa-0527f2e58bea | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Sea and Cake leader returns with a very different kind of album from his two song-based solo LPs, releasing a contemplative, loose electronic record. | The Sea and Cake leader returns with a very different kind of album from his two song-based solo LPs, releasing a contemplative, loose electronic record. | Sam Prekop: Old Punch Card | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14654-old-punch-card/ | Old Punch Card | In January 2007 Sam Prekop talked to Pitchfork about an upcoming album by the Sea and Cake, the Chicago band he fronts. He also mentioned that someday he wanted to make an electronic record inspired in part by Plux Quba, an obscure late-1980s album by Portuguese composer Nuno Canavarro that got a second life when it was reissued a decade later by Jim O'Rourke's Mokai imprint. "That's the high-water mark, in my opinion, of electronic music," Prekop said. "It's a really delicate, beautiful, and really weird record." I can remember reading that quote and getting excited. Plux Quba is indeed a very special record that is also hard to pin down, and it's a good feeling when you find out that someone else hears what you were hearing in an album-- especially one that never really got around. A record inspired by Plux Quba was promising to say the least.
Three years later, Prekop returns with Old Punch Card, an instrumental album that's very different from his two song-based solo records. Whether or not this is the album Prekop was thinking about in early 2007, to my ears it shares a spirit with Plux Quba and brings with it some of the same slippery qualities. In describing the record, it's easier to begin with what it's not: It's almost all electronic, but it's not drone, not really ambient, and doesn't conform to the structures of pop. It's not cinematic, not minimal, and not focused on the sound of technology as an end in itself. It's an album that thrives in the gaps between established categories, with music that can come over as cool and cerebral or tinged with longing and melancholy, depending on what the listener brings to it.
Though it is abstract, Old Punch Card is playful. It's like the sound of a guy bumping around in a room filled with weird noisemakers, trying out one and then another until he finds one that sounds especially interesting. At which point he sticks with it for a while to see what it does and what sort of feelings might be coaxed out of it. So the first three minutes of a track called "Array Wicket" consist of static and a warbly organ line that doesn't go anywhere in particular, and then in the last two a pulsing synthesizer line out of an early Tangerine Dream record comes marching through, conveying something sonically clear and direct in contrast to earlier ambiguity. These sharp movements from one sound to the next happen a lot on Old Punch Card, but the overall effect is soothing rather than jarring. There are passages of quiet noise, retro-sounding sequencers, indiscernible electronics that sound vaguely like broken music boxes, bits of guitar. A mood of thoughtful contemplation mixed with blurry flecks of sadness and joy is maintained throughout.
Since the music on Old Punch Card isn't trying to do anything in particular and the rules of composition are pretty loose, the guiding principle seems to be to maintain a careful sense of balance that reinforces the music's curious Zen-like character. Prekop is also a painter, and you can imagine these pieces being assembled like canvases-- this one needs a little color in this corner, maybe, and that one could use a little more prickly texture in the center. The subtle and seemingly simple music that comes from such an approach is easy to overlook, and it's not going to appeal to everyone. But it can also lead to records like Plux Quba, records you can return to for years and never get tired of, in part because you can never quite "solve" them. I'm hearing some of that open-ended mystery in Old Punch Card; we'll see what it grows into. | 2010-09-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-09-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | September 17, 2010 | 7.6 | 55706f24-6e91-415e-bb00-043f95269c78 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
An icon of ’90s pop-dance crossover who produced Madonna’s Ray of Light, the UK musician returns with his first album in eight years, but the record’s endless-sunset vibes quickly turn cloying. | An icon of ’90s pop-dance crossover who produced Madonna’s Ray of Light, the UK musician returns with his first album in eight years, but the record’s endless-sunset vibes quickly turn cloying. | William Orbit: The Painter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/william-orbit-the-painter/ | The Painter | From landing a Top 10 hit with an early dance classic to producing Madonna, London’s William Orbit was a low-key presence at some of electronic music’s most important crossover moments. “Fascinating Rhythm,” a 1990 single from his group Bass-o-matic, was a magically haunting bit of slow-motion house, while his Strange Cargo albums were landmark releases, mixing fourth-world electronics with dub basslines, ambient house trills, and new-age atmosphere. Later he worked on Madonna’s Ray of Light and Music and Blur’s 13, stopping only to invent classical trance with his hugely influential cover of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” before getting heavily into cocaine in the 2010s, doing what he describes as his “rock’n’roll excess thing,” and eventually being committed to a psychiatric hospital.
Orbit makes his re-entry with The Painter, his first album since 2014. His productions sound as opulent as ever, daubed with lavish string arrangements, sparkling guitars, and the most polished vocal effects that a lucrative production career can bring. On the opening “Duende,” luxuriously plucked guitar meets gorgeous string sweeps, guest singer Katie Melua’s effusively processed voice, and a slightly anodyne beat. A gilded balloon of ambient pop floating in a directionless waft of relaxation, this is music that doesn’t have to be anywhere in a hurry. “Gold Coast” is another indolent highlight, its plaintive guitar riff, twinkling piano, and electronic squiggles bubbling like hot oil in a lava lamp, while “I Paint What I Can See” (featuring longtime collaborator Beth Orton) makes excellent use of a bassline reminiscent of Orbit’s excursions into dub on Strange Cargo III.
It all sounds very nice, and it is—potentially too much so for The Painter’s overall good. What is, on paper, a tantalizing group of guest singers—including Colombian-Canadian Lido Pimienta and late Tanzanian musician Hukwe Zawose—succumbs to a honeyed stream of premium chill-out moods and expensive sunset feels. “Nuestra Situación,” featuring Pimienta, may be the most telling example: The reggaeton-lite beat nods to genuine musical progress in Orbit’s world, but sees its resistance washed away in identikit synth and piano vibes. Zawose’s sampled vocal on “Heshima kwa Hukwe” endures a similar fate, its edges drowned in Orbit’s ornate blurs.
This is an affliction that hits The Painter time and again, as singers as distinct as knitted-brow electro artist Polly Scattergood and house crooner Ali Love are lost to a Dido-ized soft focus. Orbit claims to focus on “melody, feeling, sonics and narrative” in his work, but it feels like he has gotten caught up in the scene-setting opening paragraphs of an idyllic travelog, rather than developing a story of dramatic depth. The exception to this is the dubbed-out “Epic” mix of “I Paint What I Can See,” a sprawling excursion into astral ambience that closes the album in a grandiloquent wave of distorted guitars and maternal low end, whose electrifying ebb-and-flow brings grit and drama to The Painter’s golden shores. Sadly, this obvious album highlight is only available on the vinyl edition of The Painter, a bizarre decision that only serves to bury Orbit’s best work.
“Epic” aside, The Painter serves up a pastel buffet of friction-free music that proves entirely pleasant in small doses. Over the length of an album, though, it feels like the day-lit nightmare of an interminable sunset, an infinity pool that literally never ends. It’s great that William Orbit is back after some difficult years, but you suspect The Painter may ultimately have been more rewarding to create than it is to listen to. It comes off as a therapeutic act from an artist who, assuming he’s managed his royalties, never really needs to work again, rather than an album that simply had to be made. | 2022-08-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Rhino | August 26, 2022 | 5.8 | 5571e2b7-3f45-4b62-a044-eed52839e74d | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The Scots offer an album-length dub version of their latest album Tonight created by former Mad Professor apprentice Dan Carey. | The Scots offer an album-length dub version of their latest album Tonight created by former Mad Professor apprentice Dan Carey. | Franz Ferdinand: Blood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13086-blood/ | Blood | Franz Ferdinand singer Alex Kapranos' vocals are often wry snapshots of hedonistic nights spent with mysterious, mercurial women. It's an example, perhaps, of a globetrotting pop star singing about what he knows (his food writing doesn't translate into three-minute singles quite as well). But the band isn't nearly as risky, uninhibited, and freewheeling when it comes to its own music. The group's sophomore album sounded like a heavyweight repressing from the same post-punk revival mold used to make its debut, and the recent Tonight came off as a tease, flirting with synthesizers and a few new directions, not to mention a rotating cast of producers. Though, to its credit, the band endured numerous false starts in an attempt to get it right-- the making-of saga even boasts a human bone-as-percussion studio story-- Tonight hinted at opportunity without fully seizing it.
Blood, an album-length dub version of Tonight, arrives as an experimental spin on the band's music at a time when they're already toying with their formula. Though it was previously included as part of a deluxe box set and released in limited quantities for Record Store Day, Blood isn't merely a collectible or curiosity. Described as "Franz through Dan's filter"-- a reference to producer Dan Carey, the former Mad Professor apprentice who was the last person to fill the producer's chair during the making of Tonight-- it's filled with relaxed recalibrations of the source material. While groups like Easy Star have made a cottage industry out of recording new dub covers, Blood goes the traditional route by rearranging and remixing elements of the original music.
Carey may have spent time recently working with Lily Allen and Kylie, but he hasn't lost his feel for reggae. "Feel the Envy", which unspools the slippery bass line and bubbling synths of "Send Him Away" and submerges the song in reverberations, and "Feeling Kind of Anxious", where Kapranos' words cycle and careen off the walls of an echo chamber, are prime examples. "Backwards on My Face", a slack remix of "Twilight Omens", wallows in a low groove, springy but crisp snare beats, and vocoded croaks that used to be Kapranos' lyrics. Many of the album's best moments recast parts of the original songs in ways that underline their melodic strength, especially the bass lines of Bob Hardy. "Katherine Hit Me", a reworking of "No You Girls", glides by on the original track's tight, funky bass line, a solid frame that stands up to the shift towards a half-time tempo and meandering effects. Carey's work calls to mind Echo Dek, Adrian Sherwood's deft reworking of the master tapes of Primal Scream's Vanishing Point, including the slightly darker, paranoid bent. Despite the album's anxiety-prone songs titles, Franz sound relaxed and just as cocksure on these remixes, rarely forced.
While the songs are well-constructed, Blood is intriguing to a certain point but lacking the jolt necessary to transcend the concept. Perhaps that's putting unfair expectation on what is a well-executed one-off exercise, but some tracks feel a bit winded-down as opposed to re-imagined. For every channel-shifting echo effect on the album, there are moments, like the pulsating synths on "Die on the Floor" or stretches where Kapranos' vocals are looped, that call to mind standard dance remixes, standard being the key word. It's arguable how "dub" a few of these tracks are-- much like Tonight, they don't fully commit. Franz's music is usually as crisp and tight as its constructivist cover art, and though reformatted, stretched out, and slowed down on Blood, it still maintains a strong pulse. Hopefully this playful detour leads to more easygoing experimentation when Franz Ferdinand start cracking skulls together for the next full length. | 2009-06-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-06-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | June 4, 2009 | 6.4 | 55735734-dcdc-4404-97d2-64449e5abee5 | Patrick Sisson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-sisson/ | null |
Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan’s first album of non-film music is moody and deliberate, folding Marc Ribot’s guitar and John Ashbery’s poetry into thick slabs of psych-rock drone. | Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan’s first album of non-film music is moody and deliberate, folding Marc Ribot’s guitar and John Ashbery’s poetry into thick slabs of psych-rock drone. | Sqürl: Silver Haze | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/squrl-silver-haze/ | Silver Haze | Music suffuses the films of Jim Jarmusch, sometimes not so much complementing as completing them. He has prominently cast Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, RZA, GZA, Meg White, John Lurie, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Briefly, he played no wave at peak CBGB. And he’s always looked the part of the art rocker, his dandelion dome of hair and Terminator shades still in place at 70. In the 2010s, as a softly growling guitarist, he conjured a razed Renaissance in several albums with the lutist Jozef van Wissem. And, working with instrumentalist and producer Carter Logan as SQÜRL, he began to score many of his own movies. A great new Jarmusch interview in The Guardian frames this turn toward music as a reaction to the sorry state of the film industry, which seems a bit like leaping from the Hindenburg and landing on the Titanic, but never mind.
Silver Haze is SQÜRL’s first album outside of cinema, yet it still feels tightly scripted, especially on “She Don’t Wanna Talk About It,” where Jarmusch and the British-German singer Anika talk past each other in a long, dark corridor of guitar. And the sets are well-dressed. “Berlin ’87” uses Super 8 footage from Europe shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall to coat a standard mood-setter—overtone-capped drone rock in the manner of Boris and Earth, both prior collaborators of producer Randall Dunn—with Cold War-era grit. On “The End of the World,” the riff is a podium at which Jarmusch, in a pleasing baritone reminiscent of John Cale, recites a postapocalyptic short story about “an older man, approaching 70” who watches “feral teenagers” doing donuts and dancing to sad pop in the concrete plaza below the prison of his apartment. This leads into a guest-laden middle run that shows off Jarmusch’s knack for casting as the focus tightens on the romance of 20th-century New York.
It’s no slight to Jarmusch and Carter that the guitar playing gets considerably more interesting when Marc Ribot shows up, as he’s one of the most distinctive, widely traveled American guitarists of his generation. Ribot started by helping Tom Waits redefine himself as a clangorous visionary in the ’80s and has cut a vast swath across art and pop music since. On “Garden of Glass Flowers,” churning riffs finally break apart into dancing, dewy angles that gradually fill with light. Ribot also plays on “Il Deserto Rosso,” which seems less imaginative than the album’s highlights, simply pairing desert rock with the title of a 1964 film by Michelangelo Antonioni. Perhaps it’s just that I haven’t seen it.
But I have read the influential American poet who gets a wonderful tribute in “John Ashbery Takes a Walk,” which features actor and musician Charlotte Gainsbourg almost whispering his experimental but accessible verses, in her musical English-French accent, over a wide, glimmering groove that explodes in slow motion. The title also brings to mind Frank O’Hara’s “Lana Turner Has Collapsed,” another beacon of the New York School of which Ashbery was an original part. Its urbane yet playful influence resonates not just here but throughout Jarmusch’s work.
It’s hard to think of Jarmusch’s musical trajectory without also thinking of David Lynch’s: two legends of American independent cinema since the 1980s who both leaned into music in their 60s. While Lynch’s bond with Angelo Badalamenti and unforgettable song scenes made his leap from film a short one, Jarmusch has perhaps an even stronger claim to be the most musical director of his cohort. In some ways, SQÜRL’s stacked delays and synths and strings are as in-the-lines as Lynch’s music is off the map. But something enriches even the most formulaic trudge-rock passages of Silver Haze. That something is Jarmusch, who brings a rich history to the proceedings, experimenting with passerelle bridges, cigar box guitars, and radio static. Just as in his films, he spins strange yet strangely familiar stories from everyday stuff. | 2023-05-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | May 18, 2023 | 6.9 | 55777a99-92bc-4c5a-b8ee-8c9ccdef12a0 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
AMY was a compassionate and horrifying Amy Winehouse documentary chronicling her brief, doomed arc through superstardom. The soundtrack is a mix of album cuts and live material, and it fails to capture the frightening intensity that Winehouse projected or to tell a new version of her story. | AMY was a compassionate and horrifying Amy Winehouse documentary chronicling her brief, doomed arc through superstardom. The soundtrack is a mix of album cuts and live material, and it fails to capture the frightening intensity that Winehouse projected or to tell a new version of her story. | Amy Winehouse: AMY: The Original Soundtrack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21214-amy-the-original-soundtrack/ | AMY: The Original Soundtrack | There are several ways one might construct a soundtrack for AMY, the compassionate and horrifying Amy Winehouse documentary chronicling her brief, doomed arc through superstardom. The obvious choice would be to make the soundtrack 100% Amy, whether through covers (the tactic of the soundtrack for the Nina Simone documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?) or through Winehouse's own voice. But in the AMY: The Original Soundtrack, Amy Winehouse is actually outnumbered: her 11 B-sides are broken up evenly by 11 snippets of film score, with the balance tipped by one exceedingly unnecessary trip-hop track, originally released in 1995.
This is not for lack of material. Winehouse began her public singing career at age 16 with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, performing and recording regularly for the next decade until her death. She's already had one posthumous compilation album (2011's poorly named, respectability-minded Lioness: Hidden Treasures), but if the tracks available on YouTube are any indication—let alone the unreleased professional recordings that her still-active fanbase lists and obsesses over on message boards—there are plenty of demos, live versions, and discarded mixes left. AMY: The Original Soundtrack, however, contains only one true "new" recording. "We're Still Friends", performed live at the Union Chapel in 2006, shows Winehouse on the cusp between her peak and downfall; the recording is precise and elegant, and she wears her strung-out voice like a crown.
The rest of the soundtrack is a mix of album cuts and live recordings, compiled primarily as signposts for the documentary's plot. There is no raw audio on the soundtrack whatsoever; it's much glossier than the film itself, which heavily relies on rough footage and successfully illuminates Winehouse outside her press narrative as a result. In AMY, it's arresting to watch her so unguarded, putting her makeup on in a bar bathroom before a gig, giving a tour of her apartment in character as a haughty maid. Her talent flames into incandescence and out of it; her flesh shrinks into bone. She's frequently captured singing in the film, from "Happy Birthday" at a friend's house to that gruesome final show in Belgrade, where she was essentially walking dead. The collage is forceful, and in context you barely notice that the film is scored at all.
The soundtrack, then, serves as your reminder. Antonio Pinto, who wrote the music for both City of God and City of Men, even has the opening track. It's a minimal, mournful minute of piano. "This is sad, remember," the song says. "What's about to happen is very, very solemn." But could there be anything that requires saying less?
Presumably, the instrumental interludes are meant to give her tragic arc some breathing room, like asterisks that break up a story. But one of the best things about the AMY documentary is that its pacing feels so natural—invisibly punishing, just like life. The effect of this soundtrack is exactly the opposite. The power of her voice is undercut by the regular intrusion of the film score, which doesn't reference her musically in palette or instrumentation. As a result, the album feels like a powerful hand clasping a limp one. Winehouse had an essential personal relentlessness, which her audience reflected back at her, and the soundtrack to a movie that climaxes at her death has no right to hide or diminish that.
Everyone already knew that Winehouse was a genius vocalist. To its credit, this collection highlights her sardonic writing, choosing songs where she translated her life cuttingly, always with a twist. She was happy to project her true self outward just enough to disguise it as a persona; she was stuck on the same themes of self-aggrandizement and self-diminishment, and she was almost supernaturally ahead of the story. As her pianist says in the documentary, she "needed music like a person, and would die for it"—and she was ready to, and did. "Rehab" was a distraction by way of being right on the nose; her many admissions ("It's not just my pride, it's just 'til these tears have dried") made us complicit. Back to Black uses depression as a euphemism for heroin in the title. Even "Tears Dry on Their Own", her black-swan sequel to "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", contains a withdrawal metaphor.
The latter is reproduced in its original album version on AMY, which is fine, because what does a rarity mean in the age of YouTube, anyway? What could be new, in this context, when the star in question was hounded to death by demons so public we all saw her crack pipe and paparazzi so relentless that they slept outside her house? This soundtrack album doesn't even seem aware of those questions, and like any album bearing Amy Winehouse's name from 2011 onwards, it's a diminishment—this time severe. | 2015-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | November 6, 2015 | 5.4 | 5579f1fb-516d-4817-b2fc-97b44708634d | Jia Tolentino | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jia-tolentino/ | null |
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